US 'Algebra for none' fails in San Francisco - The goal was equity. The result: Meh.

'Algebra for none' fails in San Francisco

The goal was equity. The result: Meh. Frustrated by high failure rates in eighth-grade algebra, San Francisco Unified decided in 2015 to delay algebra till ninth grade and place low, average and high achievers in the same classes. The goal was to improve achievement for black and Hispanic...

www.joannejacobs.com

Frustrated by high failure rates in eighth-grade algebra, San Francisco Unified decided in 2015 to delay algebra till ninth grade and place low, average and high achievers in the same classes. The goal was to improve achievement for black and Hispanic students, preparing more for advanced math.

That didn't happen, concludes a study by a team of Stanford professors. "Large ethnoracial gaps in advanced math course-taking . . . did not change." Black students aren't more likely to enroll in AP math; Hispanic enrollment increased by 1 percentage point. Overall, there was no change in the number of students receiving credit for advanced math classes, or the number taking math in 12th grade.

A proposed new California math framework encourages other districts to copy San Francisco's math reforms, for which the district claimed success, writes Sarah Schwartz in Education Week.

Math reformer Jo Boaler, a Stanford education professor and advocate of the new framework, co-authored a commentary, How one city got math right, in the Hechinger Report.

Test data from 2015 to 2019 shows that racial "achievement gaps have widened," wrote Tom Loveless last year. The district "is headed in the wrong direction on equity." Black and Hispanic 11th-graders in San Francisco earned "appalling" scores on the state math test, "about the same as or lower than the typical fifth-grader" in the state.

The district had bragged that algebra failure rates had dropped. Families for San Francisco, a parent group, analyzed the data: Failure rates dropped after the district dropped the end-of-course exam.

"Algebra for none" made it harder for achievers to succeed without helping low achievers, writes Fordham's Jeanette Luna. Families face a "nightmare of workarounds" to get their high-achieving children on track for advanced math, write Rex Ridgeway and David Margulies in a San Francisco Examiner commentary.

"Families with resources turn to fee-required online algebra 1 courses in eighth grade, outside the public school system, or enroll their kids in private schools," they write. Those who can't afford it must take a compression class that combines advanced algebra and pre-calculus or take a year of double math to get on track for AP Calculus.

The district "will take credit for my granddaughter’s mathematical success as proof their policies work," one of the authors writes. "In reality, this took two of her summers and nearly $2,000." A group of parents have filed a lawsuit against San Francisco Unified charging the math policy violates state law by denying access to advanced math to disadvantaged students, reports Allyson Aleksey in the San Francisco Examiner.

SFUSD “kids with privilege can advance in mathematics, and those without privilege cannot advance," said lead petitioner Annesa Flentje. "Ironically, SFUSD made these changes in the name of equity, but putting in barriers to accessing (advanced courses) is not equitable. . . . those with privilege are opting into private school.”

On Feb. 6, Judge Carrie Zepeda ruled in favor of Palo Alto parents who brought a similar lawsuit.

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...Why would huwite supremacy do this?!

 

[Piss Clam]

I'm a programmer and fucking algebra is second hand. I can't understand how you can't learn

calculus and trig, yeah OK, but fucking algebra?

 

[ZazietheBeast]

Let's see what Subversion has noted when it comes to making demoralized cattle. You want to teach kids useless shit. Not information that can actually help them such as math, science and home economics, but shit such as genital mutilation and drag queen story hour. In fact, there's plenty of schools that have slashed those very classes just so they can pass kids wholesale.

Fun fact: even Californian educators outright tell you to pull out your kids from public education. They know that the environment is too toxic for learning. Makes sense when you are too worried about the undisciplined ape next to you who would rather maul you than learn something new.

 

[吉田 直樹]

I agree that money can help a lot, but in current year if you have any amount of access to internet, you have a vast amount of free resources that you can use to better yourself. Even without piracy there are full, free textbooks you can download and work through.

You can legit only watch YouTube and learn your current math course faster, and better than your teacher. Majority of teachers are terrible at their jobs and I realized this when taking a math course in college. She would dribble on about her life and God which is nice and all, but I'm here to learn shit for spending tons of money.

The only thing she graded was tests and not any of the homework, she said 2 weeks into the class it was optional to do it. That shit blew my mind so instead I watched a YouTube channel that taught me the entire course in the span of 2 weeks and got a 102% for me overall grade. American education is fucked and college has little to no value nowadays and also, complaining about privilege is a bunch of fucking bullshit as you said. You can easily get all the materials for free to learn any new language and a slew of other information. Those kids have smartphones so they're all full of shit.

 

[NerdShamer]

.Nowadays there's no excuse except laziness or genuine stupidity.

Well, they'll frame it as an mass outbreak of dyscalculia if they were really desperate; but as it is, this more of your the kids being too lazy to actually read their textbooks than anything else. Because unlike history or science, low-level mathematics isn't something that's constantly changing.

I'm a programmer and fucking algebra is second hand. I can't understand how you can't learn

calculus and trig, yeah OK, but fucking algebra?

You know, there's an little bit of algebra (and autism) involved in optimising the meta in quite an few video games. It's kind of funny, in an way

 

[xX_rAcE_wAr_420_Xx]

I agree but you also have to keep in mind that kids who struggle in math usually struggle very much with stuff like that. There's no one size fits all but stuff like Khan Academy and OpenStax are geared towards people at their level and very tard friendly, it just takes actually sitting down and doing the work.

Perhaps I am too gracious but I believe most people, especially kids, who are "bad at math" never bothered to try to learn. Nowadays there's no excuse except laziness or genuine stupidity.

This is my personal autistic rage topic. Some people are "better at math" than others, but with the proper guidance I'm pretty sure anyone of even average intelligence could get to calculus without a huge amount of work. The problem is that you need a rock-solid foundation, to understand the principles that make up the theory of what you use later on.

The way that public education shoves kids along the cattle car, once you fall behind it takes twice as much work to go back and fill in the cracks. Don't quite understand why substitution in Alg 1 works the way it does? That's going to cause you a ton of fucking problems in trig, if you even make it that far. And the entire way, math "just won't make sense" to you, because you're missing the fundamentals.

Public math education is just a humiliation ritual that convinces 90% of the population that they can't do anything more than basic addition. If I were conspiratorially-minded, I'd assume it was to produce a financially-illiterate slave class in permanent credit card debt, because it sure as shit does a good job of that.

 

[Malodorous Merkin]

Is this about right?

Here was the strategy-

Phase 1: Delay Algebra till 9th grade, so the white and Asian kids didn't start young, and way outpace the black and hispanic kids. So basically keep them all math ignorant until 9th grade(when the liberal teachers took control of them in high school), so they could all start evenly as mathematical dumbbells, and nobody had a head start.

Phase 2: Throw the dumbass black and hispanic kids directly into the same math class bucket with the white and Asian kids, so then the black and hispanic kids would learn math by osmosis, and be magically pulled along in the slipstream of the white and Asian kids, and they'd all cross the finish line of mathematical achievement together!

Phase 3: Profit!!!

To the utter shocked Pikachu face of everybody on the planet, it failed completely.

The parents of the white and Asian kids refused to play along with the "Keep them all equally as dumb, because equity" part of the plan, and they just spent their own money, and sent their kids to math tutors, because fuck that stupid liberal teachers union bullshit.

So the whites and Asians started with a mathematical head start same as before, and the blacks and hispanics weren't able to do the "crabs in a bucket" thing the progressive teachers hoped they would, and they didn't manage to drag the white and Asian kids down to a properly-equitable level of mathematical retardation with them.

The white and Asian kids succeeded and went on to advanced math classes, same as before.

The black and hispanic kids failed and stayed in the crab bucket, same as before.

 

[Clotso Coof]

Weird how the disadvantaged, poor as dirt Asian kids do well in math. Chinatown dray cleaners kids, whose parents speak zero English, still manage to do well in math.

The district had bragged that algebra failure rates had dropped. Families for San Francisco, a parent group, analyzed the data: Failure rates dropped after the district dropped the end-of-course exam.

LMAO. Now the kids don't even have to prove they understand ANY of the material to pass the worthless class.

 

[Gar For Archer]

Is this about right?

Here was the strategy-

Phase 1: Delay Algebra till 9th grade, so the white and Asian kids didn't start young, and way outpace the black and hispanic kids. So basically keep them all math ignorant until 9th grade(when the liberal teachers took control of them in high school), so they could all start evenly as mathematical dumbbells, and nobody had a head start.

Phase 2: Throw the dumbass black and hispanic kids directly into the same math class bucket with the white and Asian kids, so then the black and hispanic kids would learn math by osmosis, and be magically pulled along in the slipstream of the white and Asian kids, and they'd all cross the finish line of mathematical achievement together!

Phase 3: Profit!!!

To the utter shocked Pikachu face of everybody on the planet, it failed completely.

The parents of the white and Asian kids refused to play along with the "Keep them all equally as dumb, because equity" part of the plan, and they just spent their own money, and sent their kids to math tutors, because fuck that stupid liberal teachers union bullshit.

So the whites and Asians started with a mathematical head start same as before, and the blacks and hispanics weren't able to do the "crabs in a bucket" thing the progressive teachers hoped they would, and they didn't manage to drag the white and Asian kids down to a properly-equitable level of mathematical retardation with them.

The white and Asian kids succeeded and went on to advanced math classes, same as before.

The black and hispanic kids failed and stayed in the crab bucket, same as before.

Watch them go full CCP and try to ban private tutoring.

 

[Pokemon Conquistador]

Why not go full Harrison Bergeron and make all the kids wear headphones that zap their ears every few seconds so they don't think?

 

[Iron Jaguar]

"Niggers and Mestizos Unable To Be Educated - Liberals Shocked."

I was the sole White kid in my class one year (thanks, liberal mother). It was eye-opening.

 

[quackrock]

Or just spend an few hours reading the math articles on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia articles on all but the most basic math subjects are famously jargon-dense and difficult to grok for new learners. Simple English Wikipedia pages are usually much more straightforward but not always available.

 

[Johnny Salami]

lace low, average and high achievers in the same classes.

All this does is piss of the smart students. I took Algebra in 7th grade, and my retarded girlfriend took it in 8th. This just fucks over Asians since
9th=algebra, 10th=algebra 2, 11th=geometry, and 12th=math analysis. This means they won't get a chance to do AP classes and save money

Black and Hispanic 11th-graders in San Francisco earned "appalling" scores on the state math test, "about the same as or lower than the typical fifth-grader" in the state.

Jeff foxworthy warned about this

 

[Otterly]

The goal was to improve achievement for black and Hispanic students, preparing more for advanced math.

Ok, that’s one goal. How about making sure the bulk in the middle get a solid grounding and the really bright ones get pushed?
When I was at secondary school (11-16 ish) we were put into ‘sets’ on what was probably a mix of a test plus teacher opinion. You could move up or down if you were placed badly or struggled. Those of us in the top set did the more advanced stuff, which still wasn’t very advanced - the middle just got on with it and the bottom set had a much simpler curriculum that focused on the basics BUT enough for them to be able to move up if they did well.
Just dumbing everyone down so no one feels bad is failing the majority.

 

[derpherp2]

I will defend her on one point. Money does help people who struggle to learn. The extra tutoring, summer classes, and certified math programs that these people are spending money on is so that their children are prepared to take advanced courses. None of those are available without the cash, time, or resources to access them.

I mean tutoring is free or cheap at this point. You can opt-in for summer classes, and there's literally after school activities.

I get that sometimes resources aren't advertised so people don't know them, like scholarships. But holy shit there is absolutely no takers for tutoring when I went.

 

[Next Task]

if you can't do algebra you are a legit retard.
here's an example
3 + X =5
X = 2
that's literally algebra at it's most basic.

But what would x be if it didn't have breakfast this morning?

 

[TheRedChair]

The program I think would have worked... in 1960.

But now??? Fuck no.

The Dumbing down of Blacks I have seen and it is because of their current culture that does not give one shit about education. You can say that with Latino's as well but less so.

These comments have repeatedly proven by fucking years of statistical analysis on both sides of the political viewpoint. Yes even the dirt bag liberal progressive left knows this all to well and refuse to acknowledge it. And so the problem continues.

You can't fix the stupid right now. I watching Rome Burn.

 

[gmax alcremie]

I feel super bad for her kids if she has any. How defeatist can you get?

Money also does not make grades. Hard work does and we all know the people pushing this garbage do not really want to work.

I think you missed the main point of the complaint. Waiting until 9th grade to start a math track means all your math courses in high school get fucked up and you can't fit in as many classes unless you pay for a summer school course like the girl mentioned in the article. Hence the ones who can afford it can achieve what used to be free but the ones who can't now are missing out on a math course because they were forced to start a year later than the rest of the country.

 

[quackrock]

This just fucks over Asians

And smart whites too, you gaptooth small-dick stinky food chink-eyed Chinaman.

 

[CYKA RUSH B]

The goal was to improve achievement for black and Hispanic students, preparing more for advanced math.

Surely THIS TIME another reality-denying policy change will work.

 

[Quarterback Rex Grossman]

Not shocking. Basketballers can't math and Pedrito only needs to learn enough to be able to qualify for foreman someday.