The New York Times reports today on the algebra wars, which arise from the fact that lots of Black kids are behind white kids in math skills:
To close those gaps, New York City’s previous mayor, Bill de Blasio, adopted a goal embraced by many districts elsewhere. Every middle school would offer algebra, and principals could opt to enroll all of their eighth graders in the class. San Francisco took an opposite approach: If some children could not reach algebra by middle school, no one would be allowed take it.
The central mission in both cities was to help disadvantaged students. But solving the algebra dilemma can be more complex than solving the quadratic formula. New York’s dream of “algebra for all” was never fully realized, and Mayor Eric Adams’s administration changed the goal to improving outcomes for ninth graders taking algebra. In San Francisco, dismantling middle-school algebra did little to end racial inequities among students in advanced math classes. After a huge public outcry, the district decided to reverse course.
This is idiotic beyond any measure. You won't close the racial gap either by making everyone take algebra or by allowing no one to take algebra. Forcing kids into or out of classes is just playing games. That's because the skill gap is real:
By 8th grade, Black kids on average are 32 points behind white kids on the NAEP test. Roughly speaking, this means Black schoolchildren in 8th grade are doing math at about a 5th grade level. They've just barely begun to add and subtract fractions and decimals. Forcing them into an algebra class they aren't prepared for won't teach them algebra any more than dressing them up in lederhosen will teach them German.¹ As for San Francisco's approach of helping Black kids by forcing other kids to wait a year for algebra, the mind reels. What kind of magic is supposed to make this work?
The only way to teach kids algebra is to teach them 5th, 6th, and 7th grade math first. And the only way to do that is to teach them 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grade math. Unfortunately, Black kids are already three grades behind by 4th grade.
It's entirely understandable that middle schools want to do something. And there might be answers out there. Most likely, though, the answer is to do a better job of teaching Black kids starting all the way back in preschool. Until we face up to that, we'll never make any progress.
¹OK, that's a weird analogy. But I'm writing this in Vienna, so lederhosen and German are on my mind.
The solution is to offer free after-school educational support for *anyone* who needs it, starting in 2nd grade. Part of it could involve students helping other students. I remember our G&T class involved reading to 1st-graders.
Also high quality early childhood education in affordable/free daycare. We should have learned this lesson from the early days of Headstart when the Perry Preschool project and other programs were created.
We aren’t the only ones who have this problem of minority kids underperforming in school. For example the UK also has a serious gap . I recently read that London has had a lot of success addressing this problem but not the rest of the country.
Many (most?) school districts would not have the budgets to institute such a program. I assume you're not saying teachers should work longer hours for free? The student tutors are a good idea (they could earn volunteer hours) but you would still need some school district employees there.
And why do "Many (most?) school districts .. not have the budgets to institute such a program?" The short answer is "Republicans". The slightly longer answer is "Because Republican parents will spend $10,000 on each of their children's education, but rebel at spending ten cents on a minority child's." And then they sneer at the minority kids when they don'r perform.
That is a hugely simplistic, biased, political comment. Not worth replying to.
The two cities here, San Francisco, and New York are not run by Republicans. And certainly the State of California is not run by Republicans. I don’t know who controls the state legislature in New York State, the Governor hasn’t been a Republican in nearly a generation.
Archmere and Sidwell are famous public schools in your mind.
Poverty prevents learning, and black children are more likely to be poor. There’s limits on what a school can do to undo systemic racism. Here, kids were showing up to school in dirty clothes (which is uncomfortable and distracting and humiliating, which prevent learning) because their parents couldn’t afford to use the laundromat or didn’t have time to get there, so schools started installing washers and dryers. Which is good! But there are a hundred other ways poor kids are disadvantaged, and schools can’t fill in all the gaps. We need real welfare, probably UBI, or this will just continue.
This is the real problem. Give poor families money early on in their children's lives. Schools will not solve this problem.
+1
However, controlling for income does little to eliminate the racial disparity.
Even within Africa, there are huge disparities in height. I do not think that anyone denies that the Maasai tower over Bushmen because of genetics - you could not take a Bushman baby and raise him in a Maasai family feeding him Maasai food and expect him to grow to six feet.
Why is it so taboo to consider if different ethnic groups have different levels of intelligence, which is also a complex polygenic trait?
If this is the case there is no reason to expect it to be as simple as "whites smart, blacks dumb". Just as Maasai are closer to the Dutch in height than they are to Bushmen and Frenchmen are shorter than both the Maasai and the Dutch, we should expect to find the distribution of intelligence to be different in different ethnic groups within races with no simple ordering by race.
Perhaps the high incomes and educations attainment of Nigerian Americans is tied as much to genetics as to culture. Poorer performance of the median African American may be due to the particular ethnic groups from which most slaves in the Americas were taken.
If this is the case, then this problem is not solvable without genetic engineering or importing large numbers of immigrants from ethnic groups in Africa which have higher intelligence, just as we could increase the median height of African Americans by encouraging large numbers of Maasai to immigrate (which is not really a solution for the people who are African Americans today). What do we do then?
I'm not aware that the Masai are unusually tall. Are you perhaps thinking of the Watusi?
Wah, wah-a Watusi
C'mon and take a chance and get-a with this dance
https://altezza.travel/en/articles/maasai-people
They are tall.
Tutsis (Watusi is an obsolete name) are also tall but not that tall.
The solution probably depends a lot on how the students are distributed. Is the issue that a subset of schools (whose students are disproportionately black) are 3 grades behind the highest performing schools (which are disproportionately white)? Or is it that black students in whichever schools are tending to fall behind their classmates?
Not sure why you're lumping NYC in with San Fran here. Having middle schools all offer algebra with the OPTION to enroll all students seems perfectly reasonable. Cutting algebra for every student is the insane policy.
They are lumped together because the NYTimes article that Drum is responding to is focused on those two cities as comparisons.
I don't think it's just because they're both in the article for comparison, because kevin goes on to say "You won't close the racial gap either by making everyone take algebra or by allowing no one to take algebra". But it doesn't sound like anyone's being forced to take algebra, it's just an option in NYC.
Come to the dark side, Kevin!
It's been almost 50 years since I've been in elementary/middle school doing math. And not having kids, I only keep up with the teaching trends via friends and colleagues, or newspaper articles. But I do remember there being something like 3 separate "tracks" for math, starting in 7th grade. Basically a remedial track, the "mainstream" (New York Regents track), and then an advanced track that in hindsight was trying to turn kids into theoretical mathematicians. They were teaching us about things like Rings and Fields in 7th grade. Axiomatic, but non-Euclidean, geometry. (Not curved-spacetime, but simpler non-Euclidean systems.) It was just kind of assumed that you'd pick up algebra along the way, and I have this memory of "let's do trig over this month" in 9th grade. It would have been a real shame to miss all of that just because not everybody could take that class.
The flip side is, I really didn't remember any minorities in the advanced math track. We were a very white, suburban school -- about 95% white. Still, there should have been some in the class. It was something you got assigned to based upon 1st-6th grade performance and teacher recommendations. You always have to wonder about the interplay between preparation and implicit biases. I've certainly seen my fair share of, "You don't belong in this class -- you should be skipped further ahead" in my college years where if the person weren't a woman or minority, I wonder if they would have been encouraged to take the less challenging class.
> teaching us about things like Rings and Fields in 7th grade
So you got the New Math all the way to the end? That ended at 6th grade for me, and I didn't figure out where it was headed until I took Foundations of Math as a college sophomore.
If I were a billionaire madman I would conduct an experiment wherein I would pick an underperforming school district somewhere in the US, one that showed the kind of academic disparities in Kevin's chart above, and just give every family unit in that school district $10,000 at the beginning of the year, no strings attached. Even people who didn't have kids -- ten grand. I would change nothing in the schools -- same curriculum, same teachers, everything. Let's say there were 5000 families in the district, that would be $50 million, change under the couch cushion for a big billionaire like me. What I would be interested in knowing is if just raising every family's household income by 10k would show up in improved educational outcomes, all else being equal.
My guess is it wouldn't transform the place overnight, but the gains would be measurable and notable. I think simply giving poor families (and their childless neighbors) that extra added measure of financial stability so no one's getting evicted, you don't have to choose between insulin or school materials, you can get the car fixed so you can get to a new, better-paying job, etc. would make a huge difference for kids.
Maybe this has actually been done somewhere -- if anyone knows of an example, it would be interesting to see what the outcome was.
For kids in 7th or 8th grade I don't think a sudden influx of money would make a huge difference in school performance. To really test this out you would need to intervene early in the lives of children. Give every family an extra $10,000 per kid, no strings attached, every year till the kid enters 9th grade. This would be a lot more expensive but would make a huge difference (I think).
Is an extra $10k going to make those parents value education more? Will it make them set an example for their kids by choosing to read a book instead of watch tv? Will it make them get involved with their kids schoolwork and spend hours with them on homework after they get home from their own jobs?
No, but they might move to a better school district.
I agree the 'solution' is idiotic but I wonder how these racial differences would reduce if the data were corrected for socioeconomic status? Based on my 30,000 thousand foot view of my kid's classmates, many of the poor white kids do worse than their well-to-do black classmates. Of the high performing black classmates, many seem to be second generation African or Caribbean kids. IDK, its complicated but regardless, this is a stupid solution.
Most likely, though, the answer is to do a better job of teaching Black kids starting all the way back in preschool.
I wish I didn't believe that the only thing that's really going to accomplish this is a huge reduction in the economic inequality plaguing Black America, but that is, in fact, what I do believe.
Yeah, this is something that takes a dedicated 20+ year commitment to helping people (especially children and those with children) maintain a stable home environment - specifically housed and fed.
Yeah, ironically Kevin's answer is probably just as helpful as the policies he's skewering. For many decades I do believe that our public schools have been turning over every rock to lower barriers and reduce inequality in the classroom, and they have almost nothing to show for it as far as test scores go.
So is the assumption that there's clearly still a bunch of racism in 2nd grade classrooms to root out? At some point maybe we should reassess our assumptions that classroom racism has to be the cause, rather than pursuing cartoonish "lederhosen" policies in an effort to so "something".
Maybe the answer is that schools should simply do everything they can to provide a level playing field (which they mostly have) and then just quit worrying about the test score disparities... they might literally be someone else's problem.
Agreed. There's only so much schools and teachers can do. (And, for the most part, they're probably already doing it.)
IMO the answer, from an educational standpoint, would be expensive, but its based on my experience with one kid who only missed 3 questions on SAT math, one kid who scored a nice 700 or whatever, and a third kid with significant special needs who was like in the bottom 5 percent and took massive effort to pass any class.
Tie class size to accomplishment. Let the well off schools top out at 20 kids per class pre middle school and 25 thereafter. If the school is underperforming, keep lowering class sizes as much as it takes.
That is, essentially, what well off families do. If they feel a child can do better, its more time, all the way up to and including paid private tutoring.
SF didn't work, but that didn't mean it wasn't a good idea. It was essentially offering an additional year for any kid who could to catch up. If Kevin's stats are right, that the problem is that the kids you want to catch up are three years behind, then they are not going to catch up in one year. Hence, no luck.
But my solution, is not based on trying to manage the upper end of the class, is focusing on the bottom level, which is the problem.
I think you might do better by reinstituting tracking so the smart kids in poor performing schools can be together and by removing children who are disruptive and dangerous from schools. These children are disproportionately present in schools with large minority populations and they make it much more difficult for other children who have the ability and desire to learn to succeed in learning.
A greater focus on elementary mathematics is certainly necessary.
A complicating factor is the highly varied math abilities of parents, along with a lot of negative views of math that get expressed at home.
Most adults are pretty bad at math. When you show them a different methods of arithmetic, they can't even begin to understand how it works (try showing East African multiplication or lattice multiplication to a random group of adults, and you'll see what I mean).
Prior to having kids I was well aware of differences between families in terms of reading to/with kids. But after having kids I realized that it is also very common with math. Some families with young kids spend car trips counting by threes out loud, or helping their kids learn to measure ingredients for baking. Those kids are set up for multiplication and fractions at an early age, and have plenty of skills and positive views of math when they enter middle school. Other kids see little math done at home, and hear lots of negative talk about math.
A strong grounding in math starting in preschool may help, but it requires public funding for early childhood ed.
Having no idea what East African multiplication is, I will simply point at Tom Lehrer and “New Math.” https://youtu.be/UIKGV2cTgqA?si=oc9LPuEruQpKJxSO
Kevin's assumption is that schools are primarily academic institutions whose main goal is teaching students reading, writing, arithmetic, history, science, and maybe a language. Schools stopped seeing themselves that way a few decades ago--they are neighborhood institutions that provide positive experiences for students while reflecting the values of the neighborhood they are in.
We should probably be teaching Algebra as soon as kids get a grasp on multiplication.
Why we wait until High School is nonsense.
No classes I took between 3rd and 7th grade (we started pre-algebra in 7th) helped me prepare for algebra.
In fact, I was in remedial math in 3rd grade and it was torture. Counting by threes? Timed tests?
I was worst in my class at 'math' until algebra, when I became best. Well, almost, I have competition. I eventually score 99th percentile on the PSATs, SATs, and ACTs... but there were two others in my class who scored better and got full ride scholarships one to Stanford, the other to University of Washington.
Before Algebra, it's not really "math". It's arithmetic which is a very different thing. Yes, they both use numbers, but in arithmetic numbers are concrete things, even decimals and fractions. They can be exemplified by physical objects and illustrations.
An equation exists entirely in a theoretical world, though the effects can be illustrated in a physics class and certainly can be used to make life in the physical world easier.
Why we wait until high school is that in fact most 10-year-olds are not yet ready neurologically to support the kind of abstract reasoning that's involved with doing algebra. I tutored college algebra and calculus, and then later tried to teach elementary school kids abstract math concepts. It doesn't work most of the time.
My preferred partial solution: year round schooling. It is well known that every summer the gap between poor and rich students jumps. Not more total days of school, just with breaks more evenly distributed.
A gap between poor and rich is not a good enough reason to stop summer vacations. Don't punish the families of higher achievers to compensate for lower achievers.
Is this a serious comment or sarcasm? I honestly can’t tell. But it isn’t punishing anyone: like I said, same total schooling, just with vacations spread evenly across the year instead of mostly in one big 2.5 month lump. And even if it was a negative (which it isn’t), if it could actually solve educational inequality, it would totally be worth it.
It is serious. I think many people would be against this as they use summer for travel, vacations, and kids to get summer jobs. I'm sure there would be some people that are for all year school (understood what you mean with same number of days) but I would think the vast majority of people would not want to give up all the opportunities summer break affords.
Try using your imagination a bit: you can still have 2 week breaks with trips, jobs, camps, etc. None of those require 10 full weeks in a row of vacation. It might require a little bit of rethinking in some cases (e.g., camps designed for colder months) and there are probably some jobs which are harder to break up into 2 week chunks, but I don’t see those as major hurdles. And there is substantial literature on the pedagogical benefits- because while summer break hits the poor the hardest, it has an effect on most students.
What is wrong with current system - kids who need it get summer school, other kids get off so families can provide other enrichment?
+1
An adjoining county and a city school system did this about 20 years ago. It has not reduced the racial disparity at all. They don't have detailed information on economic disparity, so I cannot speak to that.
If the parents don't value education, the child is very unlikely to value education. The worst problem in my county was building a new high school 15-18 years ago. The focus was on who was going there, but in doing so other kids got moved. Apparently no one in the school redistricting plan bothered to ask the police/sheriff the effect on a school at the opposite end of the county. They crossed gang lines with the new map. That school has the teachers that no other school wants.
For the most part, I think schools are doing what they can to educate black kids in math. I'm not saying they shouldn't continue to develop and implement new and innovative ideas to close the gap. (As long as you're not holding back higher achievers, which they were apparently doing in San Francisco. That is the most preposterous thing I've ever heard.) But, at the end of the day, students will not be successful if their home life doesn't foster success. When parents value education, are involved with their kids' education, and set good examples, the kids will have a chance to succeed. If they don't do those things, they kids don't have much of chance no matter what the schools and teachers are doing.
you basically repeated your pruor comment. but there are people who are working 2 and 3 jobs and don't have time to spend hours after work helping their kids. they do value education but they are poor. I did not know this until my daughter was doing some union organizing. I asked a cleaning lady where I worked if she had a second job and she did. After 8 hours at the office bldg where I worked, she went to a second job. her husband was disabled. I now volunteer at a church thrift shop. A woman came in to look around and said she worked several jobs to keep her sons in private school.. She said she was never home before 11. My point is, have a little compassion. Maybe try talking to people outside your circle and listen to their stories. you may get some insight
There definitely are some families like that. They deserve compassion and, hopefully, their hard work will pay dividends and be a model their kids will emulate.
There's also many that don't give a shit. My wife is a teacher my mother is a retired teacher, and my aunt is a teacher. Their hearts break when they try so hard to help the kids succeed and the parents do nothing. They have kids that don't make it to school sometimes because their parents are sleeping and won't bother to wake up to bring them in. The kids are ignorant of so many things because the parents don't foster a sense of curiosity and make any effort to imbue knowledge. My wife is an ESE (special ed) teacher and she can't get some parents to come in to meet with her to discuss their kids' progress. At the end of every school year she buys a bunch of books and gives them to her students because she knows that's the only way any of them will have the chance to see a book over summer.
This.
I didn't pay attention to the parameters of each group, but a few years ago there was a NYer article about a study of lower income and middle/upper income families. The kids of whatever age (sorry again) of lower income families averaged a fraction of the verbal messaging time with adults in their early years as the upper income kids. And the messages for the lower incomes were more often orders and criticism while the upper incomes were more often discussions and positive reinforcement.
I live in a mainly working class area of Brooklyn, now half Asian. On the elevated subway I've seen a father pointing out store signs to his little kid. Asian kids often spend time looking out the windows, presumably because they have been taught things about the world and to be interested in it.
I saw a young Asian mother facing a little boy of about 3 or 4 and showing him flash cards with letters or vocabulary words. The most impressive part is that when he didn't know one he would make a kid joke and she would pretend to swat him on the head with the cards with both of them laughing. It was a very high level interaction besides the teaching part.
I've seen some pretty bad or neglectful seeming stuff going on with Black and Hispanic parents and kids on the subway at times, but never as far as I can recall with Asians.
This racial and class essentialism here is breath-taking.
I am also a teacher, Atticus. I've been one for nearly three decades. I've worked in: wealthy lily-white suburbs, middle-class mixed urban schools, working class minority schools, poor inner-city black/brown "struggling" schools... both in the North and the South. And there are lazy and neglectful parents of all races and all socio-economic strata. Some of the worst horror stories I have come from neglectful and abusive parents in the lily-white neighborhoods with average household income over $200K... and yet, the well-funded school districts still ranked in the top-ten in the state. I'm talking: parents who don't bother getting their kids to school on time, parents who don't bother giving their kids a sense of curiosity and pass on a limited and blinkered attitude. Parents who can't be bothered to find time to come in and talk about their kids struggling on standardized tests or who were caught plagiarizing for the Nth time because they couldn't keep up with the material or the pacing. And yet, the kids on average tend to do fine, given all the plentiful resources available in the district, all the money that can be thrown at a problem.
I've seen parents and guardians in poor neighborhoods finding time between their two jobs to help their kids, and staying super-engaged in their education. I know for a fact that far more parents show up to parent-teacher nights at working-class and poor school districts, than bother to show up at the wealthiest suburban districts. I see caring, dedicated parents of all stripes and colors in the inner city, who point out signs, read with their kids, talk with their kids in positive and uplifting ways. Who are encouraged to value their educational opportunities and take nothing at face value.
Please don't feed me the same old crap about "brown schools suck" and "Asians are good at math", and actually take a look at the sub-ethnicity and income level breakdowns in minority communities that lead to elevated test scores in the "Asian" group. Any guesses as to whether money and income play a significant role?
When 1/6 of white folk think substandard education of minority kids is a feature, not a bug, and a sizable chunk of the liberal progressives that actually say they want to do something just nod along to BS racist dog-whistles from the 70s and 80s, no wonder there's no political constituency for actually trying to do anything other than blame schools and kids for underlying social ills.
My children had 45 different different teachers between 1st-8th grade. All of them told the same story. They all said they had many individual parents show up for early reading more than ALL the parents across several years of teaching at inner city schools COMBINED.
Probably those parents had 12-13 jobs and didn't have the time.
Solution is obvious. Every student is enrolled in algebra class and every one of them gets a passing grade*. Those student who can do math will learn algebra and those that can't won't feel bad about themselves.
* actually, according to some, grades lead to "stratification" which is something that must be avoided at all costs.
Slightly off-topic but certainly related: how easy is it to ask ChatGPT, or other similar stuff, to do your math homework for you? (Sincere question: I don't have kids so don' t have any first hand experience with this.)
Sure seems to me the "harder" subjects are going to be the first ones that get turned over to the machines.
Easy. You don't even need AI to do a subject like Algebra. There is a right answer in Algebra.
Sad part is even that is too much work for some of the kids. They are going to $$$$$$$$$ online. Who needs an education to be monetized on TikTok or Youtube?
There are two different independent variables being considered here; skin color and economic status. If the student population is divided into four groups (poor black, poor white, non-poor black, non-poor white) is there a correlation between math performance and race, or math performance and economic status, or both?
If black kids are not keeping up with their white counterparts of the same economic status, then the issue is race. If the poor kids are not keeping up with the rich kids, then the issue is money. If there's a gradient, with poor black kids at the bottom, richer white kids at the top, and the other two groups in between, both money and race are issues.
But standardized tests are infected by the implicity or overt racism of the test makers. We know this because there is a racial gap in NAEP scores.That the test shows a racial difference proves the test is structurally racist.
Seriously, this is the argument made by intelligent people I know. It is pretty much Ibram Kendi's thesis. One you realize this ideology is common in the educational establishment the sort of policy KD hates is easier to understand. I have learned not never reveal Kendi's theories are weak and circular.
If you believe I am overstating force yourself to read Stamped: {A Remix} by Jason Reynolds & Ibram X. Kendi. This is widely taught in middle school, it was the main text in my son's 8th grade class. It is shockingly bad.
The original Build Back Better proposal advocated by progressive Democrats included monthly child credit payments and also included money for child care. Those two things would go a long way toward helping kids--both with food and other resources, and more preschool options.
The reason why we have poor performing schools and students is that Americans refuse to pay for better schools (for anyone other than their own kids), smaller class sizes, and universal child care for working families.
How much should we pay? We already pay a ton through property taxes plus (in my area) an additional amount in sales tax that was approved by voters in a referendum.
Reading this blog post and the comments, all I can really say is this: where have you all been?
From Kevin: “As for San Francisco's approach of helping Black kids by forcing other kids to wait a year for algebra, the mind reels. What kind of magic is supposed to make this work?”
Indeed. And other commenters refer to San Francisco’s policy (taking the Algebra option away from all middle schoolers because middle schoolers of a particular race are mostly bad at it) as insane, idiotic, or preposterous.
The one thing that you all seem to be leaving out, however, is the name of what you’re criticizing. There is an identifiable sociopolitical movement behind this idiocy. There is a well-known ideology causing Kevin’s mind to “reel.” So why doesn’t anyone offer those names?
That seems to be the main difference between me and others here. I name names. And when I do so, I am typically attacked by some of the same commentators who, in response to this post, are making the same points they have attacked me for making elsewhere.
So, I don’t know how to break it to everyone, but when you criticize San Francisco’s algebra policy, you’re criticizing Leftists, you’re criticizing DEI, and you’re criticizing the groupthink supporting these movements.
DEI infamously stands for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, but, in this case, each one of those terms is a euphemism.
Diversity, in regard to DEI, does not mean integration: it means racial essentialism. It means putting the interests and concerns of favored races above those of other races.
And equity is here a term signifying the opposite of equality. Some of you in these comments are arguing for equality of opportunity (by, for example, spending more money on schools or by helping struggling students regardless of their background). But equity, instead, insists on equal outcomes. And if that’s impossible because black middle schoolers aren’t doing well in algebra, then the algebra class must go so that equal outcomes (equity) among all racial groups can be restored.
And inclusion, in a terrifyingly Orwellian sense, means the exact opposite of inclusion. It means inclusion of the right people who think the correct way and the exclusion of everyone else.
Kevin and practically every single commentator on this post is criticizing DEI. And I think that’s great. But why not identify the name of the policy you’re indicting?
That’s what I do practically every other day here on Kevin’s blog. And what usually happens is that the same people agreeing with me in response to this blogpost turn around and vilify me once I actually name the object of our mutual ire.
Not that this is going to move Leo's needle at all, since for him this is pretty baked in, but the SF policy was far, far from ridiculous. Its only ridiculous when spun as "ok, nobody gets algebra" -when, sorry, that's not the point.
To get to the point, you have to ask what are these schools even for? I would argue, as a taxpayer and parent, that public K-12 schools really do not need, to function, from say 6th grade onward, as some sort of high level competitive college prep system where the entire point is to see how many kids out of a class of, say, 400, get into not only colleges, but Ivy League level ones. If that is your goal as a school (and my kids have gone to several where that is indeed the goal, and expressly so) then that school will do a number of things, starting with separating kids into different tracks, so that those in the advanced track can cover more advanced material, offering more AP classes, for a similar reason.
The tracks are not, from my experience, so that the kids in the crap ola track can do well, the kids in the crap ola track are written off, no school gets a California distinguished school award for the bottom third of the class.
I have my anecdotes, as one of my kids with a major learning disability was basically completely written off by the school. I mean as long as he didn't burn it down they could have cared less.
But I digress, so, as a first principle, lets say you can go from 9th grade Algebra to 12th grade pre-calc, and that is enough to prepare anyone for the SAT math.
Oh, hold on a second, who is that waving their hand in the background? A parent who was hoping they could at least get summer school algebra in 5th grade for little Jimmy? All the better to rack up some AP's for the Dartmouth application?
So the point is, everybody in SF got to take algebra, the district just decided that if it was going to offer the class (as it obviously was) that if it waited to offer it until 9th grade that the most possible kids could actually qualify to take it.
And, of course, maybe a byproduct would be that under-achieving kids would have that one more year. Don't you see? At some point the school, even the SF district, was going to say "you are not qualified for algebra" I fail to see the rush. We all know the kids who could have taken algebra in 8th grade or sooner are going to figure out how to advance their math skills regardless of when its offered.
So, it turns out one more year was not enough. Not surprising since Kevin easily pointed out that the kids who this policy might have helped were nowhere near 8th grade algebra anyway. That hardly makes it a ridiculous thing to try.
Many US high schools have stopped, and this is all up and down the academic line, BEING INSTUTUTIONS OF EDUCATION, and are in fact umpires -- providing a way to start ranking kids so that the next step of the process, the colleges, can easily sort who they want to let in.
I think, if you have any critical thinking left on this issue, you would at least acknowledge that the entire purposes of a public school should be to narrow outcomes as much as it can, by educating the bottom half or so of the class. Its the last chance that bottom half is going to have by the way. After high school its every man for himself, that's for sure.
But that one year was not enough should have been clear to those running the SF school system. They would have had at least as much information about how well their students were doing and how far behind, as Kevin has. Much more even. As such, calling it a ridiculous thing to try seems appropriate.
@ Yikes:
I try to be fair, but it's difficult to clearly discern your main point. Perhaps this comes close:
"I fail to see the rush. We all know the kids who could have taken algebra in 8th grade or sooner are going to figure out how to advance their math skills regardless of when its offered."
I'll be blunt: if you "fail to see the rush" then you don't in fact understand the issue. Here is the SF Chronicle on this point:
"Many parents have been clamoring for the district to reinstate eighth-grade algebra because it allows students to take calculus by the time they are seniors without having to double up on math classes or go outside the district. "
Basically, if you really want to lift students up, you have to lift them up. And that means maintaining, not lowering, standards. Honestly, it's not complicated. The SF chronicle again:
"Discussions over education policy should ideally be happening with the Board of Education. Nevertheless, teaching algebra to eighth graders is a worthwhile pursuit to enhance public education and to potentially staunch declining district enrollment."
Paging Harrison Bergeron... Paging Harrison Bergeron.
Kurt Vonnegut was writing a cautionary tale, not a "How to" manual.
If some kids are ready for Algebra in 7th or 8th grade then let them take it. If some need to wait for 9th or 10th grade then let them wait.
Now, inevitably, that means that some kids will be on the slow track from school. By the time they finish high school they will have only passed algebra while others will have two years of calculus under their belts. Why is this a problem? Well, apparently because that is "ranking kids so that the next step of the process, the colleges, can easily sort who they want to let in." Of course it is - obviously kids with two years of calculus passed by the end of high school have a big leg up applying to top universities. Isn't that totally appropriate?
The purpose of public school should absolutely NOT be to narrow outcomes. That is Harrison Bergeron in a nutshell. It should be to give every child the best leg up on life that is possible given his/her abilities. For some students that will be second year calculus. For others it will be learning a trade - skilled trades make good money. For some it will be learning how to show up for a job on time, follow instructions, and budget for their household. For an unfortunate few it will be how to take public transport independently and live independently or semi-independently.
Shouldn't the goal be for each student to reach his/her highest potential? Schools should be trying to do the opposite of "narrowing outcomes". That's would mean they're just trying for the lowest common denominator.
@Atticus:
Just an FYI: any time we hear talk on the Left about “equity,” they’re talking about “narrowing outcomes” among racial groups. The part typically left unsaid is that most if not all Leftists see lowering standards as an entirely legitimate if not laudatory way to achieve that goal.
We are all now helping to fund thousands of DEI administrators at state schools, and they are cumulatively paid hundreds of millions of dollars to “narrow” racial “outcomes.”
Few if any of them are there to help bright or gifted students reach their highest potential.
Why, after all, have certain demographic groups, such as Asians and Jews, been accused of, among other things, promoting white supremacy?
Yahoo News reported on Alison Collins while she was still a member of the San Francisco school board:
“Collins accused ‘many Asian American Ts, Ss, and Ps’ — teachers, students, and parents — of promoting ‘the model minority BS’ and of using ‘white supremacist thinking to assimilate and get ahead.’”
The best and brightest aren’t appreciated by these Leftists; rather, high achievers are reviled.
And DEI isn’t designed to help bright students in any way. It is, in fact, specifically intended to slow them down, trip them up, or in some way stop them from being smarter people or harder workers than anyone else.
Taking away their 8th grade algebra class is just one of many ways to penalize our smart students for the sin of being smart. How dare they make children of other races look bad by comparison? That must be stopped! Because Equity!
DEI, in fact, is one of the top scandals in our country at this time, and it’s certainly one of the very top scandals in the history of American education.
Liberals seem to have been at least partly blinded to this fact because Conservatives like Chris Rufo have led long-running anti-DEI campaigns.
But it just should not matter that conservatives dislike DEI. Liberals should in fact make common cause with conservatives on this issue. Because, when it comes to American education, Conservatives and Liberals alike will benefit from rooting out the Leftist extremism that has done so much horrible damage to our educational institutions.
I’ll try to give a more deserving reply later when I have more time. For now, all I can say is, thank goodness I live in Florida where we don’t have to deal with that kind of nonsense.
There should not be a uniform schedule for math. Kids who are going to go the STEM track and graduate after 12th grade should have calculus in 12'th grade - although it is possible to do many of these fields if you are smart and very hard working if you take calculus at the start of your college courses.
But many states offer Running Start / College in High School programs which allows the student to go to college in 11th grade and earn both high school and college credit. If a student hopes to use such a program - and in the process cut their college cost in half, they need to be ready for Calculus no later than 11th grade. This pushes math earlier into the grade schedule, as most students will take pre-Calculus, Algebra 2, Geometry, and Algebra before they take Calculus.
My son, who is not by any means mathematically oriented, survived STEM calculus in what would have been 11th grade and went into the business college. You still need a reasonable calc and algebra background to handle stat and the econ clases. He actually enjoyed accounting. And you need a reasonable algebra background for Chemistry. Physics, Engineering, and Econ will take all the math you can get.
I went to a Junior High School in NW DC in the mid 60's, even then a poor, mostly black community. My college prep track was perhaps half white, with the other half being black girls. There were no black boys. It was clearly a cultural issue. When DC dropped tracking, we moved out. I then went to Baltimore Poly, a city wide engineering focused school. None of my peers were well to do, many were the children of Jewish shopkeepers, survivors of the Holacaust. And they were very focused upon education - they knew it was the route out.
go Poly. Poly is still city wide engineering, significant black population, but certainly not all.
Bringing this up makes people angry even if the logic is sound. As Kevin has acknowledged in older posts, IQ tests have consistently shown an IQ gap between blacks and whites.
The Wikipedia page summarizes: “A 2001 meta-analysis of the results of 6,246,729 participants tested for cognitive ability or aptitude found a difference in average scores between black people and white people of 1.1 standard deviations.” So IQ tests have shown an IQ gap on average of about 15 points between blacks and whites. The gaps show up from kindergarten on, but they can vary some by age.
So say we have a perfect education system. It is not realistic for white kids with an IQ of 85 to do as well in math as other white kids with an IQ of 100. And it's not realistic for white kids with an IQ of 105 to do as well as white kids with an IQ of 120.
Similarly, it’s not realistic for black kids with an IQ of 85 to do as well in math as other black kids with an IQ of 100. And it's not realistic for black kids with an IQ of 105 to do as well as other black kids with an IQ of 120.
So then it also follows that it’s not realistic for black kids with an IQ of 85 to do as well in math as white kids with an IQ of 100. And it's not realistic for black kids with an IQ of 105 to do as well as white kids with an IQ of 120.
For the IQ groupings just mentioned, you have to think in terms of averages for each group. Of course there are cases where one kid with an IQ of 105 getting better math scores than another kid with an IQ of 120.
So I don't see any solution to equalize math scores between lower IQ whites and higher IQ whites, or lower IQ blacks and higher IQ blacks, or lower IQ blacks and higher IQ whites.
If you want to equalize math scores between black kids and white kids, you somehow have to equalize IQ scores first. There is some evidence that the IQ gap has been closing over time. That's great news if true and this continues.
Always be careful when you see statistics like this. Which blacks? Which whites? How is your sample being designed.
Among whites, there are significant IQ differences between ethnic groups.
I do not believe this is a well studied among blacks, but given the greater genetic diversity of Africa (the proto-humans who left Africa went through a population bottleneck that greatly reduced genetic diversity) it would be very surprising if there are not ethnic groups with significan IQ differences. Why would you expect Ethiopians and South Africans to have the same IQ distribution just because they are both black?
If the study is looking at African Americans and American Whites how is it classifying them? Is it using the one drop rule to determine who is African American or a more scientific 50% rule? How are biracial people being factored into the statistics given that most African Americans descended from slaves have at least some white ancestry?
My understanding for IQ tests are that they go by how Americans self-identify, meaning black, white, Asian, etc. As the Wikipedia quote above shows, the meta studies conclude the IQ gaps are real. There is really no debate about this.
Regarding race, or ancestral populations, whatever or you want to call it, American blacks are on average about 80% African and 20% white. Americans who are around 80% African and 20% white will almost always self-identify as black. Also, of course, new African immigrants will self-identify as black too.
My understanding is that people who self-identify as biracial are not included as being black in IQ studies. Biracial people, from person to person, can vary dramatically in terms of their ancestry. For example, my son in law is part white and part Mexican Indian.
I only mention these points to clarify groups being compared, not to say genetics explains the IQ gaps.
Nope.
My wife taught for many years in Title I schools, which are almost entirely black. At the beginning of every month, she would have a crop of new students while others disappeared. After a few months many of them would be back while new ones disappeared.
What's happening is that their parents are so strapped for cash that the go from apartment to apartment, from one move-in special to the next.
Those kids have no stability in their lives. They have no long term friends so they fight with each other all the time. They are not in the same school with the same teacher long enough to have any continuity in their education.
You can't fix that with pedagogy, or browbeating teachers or blaming principles. That is a large scale poverty problem that is baked into society. You want to fix the math and reading gaps? Then you have to face the actual problem and deal with poverty. But we are still a racist society and don't want to deal with that. We'd rather blame them for being lazy. And then they grow up to be poor due to poor education and the cycle repeats.
The problem is NOT with the schools and no amount of tweaking the schools will fix it.
@pjcamp1905:
I’ll be honest, this is just beyond tiresome, reductive, lazy, and ultimately boring:
“But we are still a racist society and don't want to deal with that. We'd rather blame them for being lazy.”
What we need to do, in order to actually help people, is look beyond the most simplistic narrative tropes like “everyone is racist.”
Personally I think the Lederhosen analogy is great. It makes the idiocy of the NY policy manifest.