> “Who is going to trust somebody who got a degree in airline engineering who doesn’t know how to think through a problem without a computer telling them the answer?”
Years ago when I was working in education (Canadian public schools) our school board had a conference ahead of the school year. The keynote was an inclusive-ed researcher / consultant / speaker who told an anecdote of how they had successfully lobbied for a student with a substantive intellectual disability to be registered for the high school physics courses.
Part of the anecdote was pushback from the physics head: "I've known Jake for years. Great kid. But what is he supposed to get out of physics class?"
The consultant's in-anecdote response: "what is anybody supposed to get out of physics class?"
Wild laughter and applause.
---
A surprising number of people in education seem to simply not know that there is substantive and consequential content in the curriculum.
Having never really learned math, they've never really used it. Having never used it, they don't recognize its utility.
They seem to earnestly believe that it isn't an actual tool but a gatekeeping mechanism devised by autistic persons to humiliate normies.
The anecdote I heard was a grade-school teacher admitting they had never used the Pythagorean formula IRL.
Well, no fucking shit, Sherlock! You aren't the sort of person to turn to math to solve problems. You're the sort of homesy chuckle-cluck who puts up inspirational posters on your bedroom wall.
OTOH, I've been on my back in an attic with a house builder, and calculated the 3-dimensional length of the bizarre edges of a skylight (where the ceiling opening was completely skew to the roof opening). We absolutely used math to solve the problem.
That grade school teacher? They wouldn't have been asked to check the calculations. The carpenter? Used math IRL.
A learned language is often lost without regular repetitive practice. People often either become overly specialized in some area, or end up teaching basic-theory while regretting their life choices.
In time, most figure out people create pet mathematical fictions regardless of background, and while authoritative confident liars often allow people to feel better about uncertainty... it adds little value in the long-term. =3
I'm not sure why this is down-voted. Nearly every single teacher I had from elementary though high school, when asked what was the usefulness of the math lesson, said that we would need it when we got to the next level of education. Elementary teachers said we would need it in middle school. Middle school teachers said we would need it in high school. High school teachers said we would need it in college. By college you learned to stop asking questions.
I'm lucky I enjoyed math and science, but I'm not surprised that people who don't enjoy it think it isn't going to be useful to them. It's very much one of the things that if you don't know how to apply it, you won't find the places to apply it, so you end up thinking it has no use.
Word. I got taught matrix multiplication in high school without any context. "Here's a grid of numbers kid. Go do some elementary school arithmetic on all of them. No it's not Sudoku I promise".
If only I'd know how important matrix multiplication would turn out to be...
To clarify, these are percentages for the sample of students taking the remedial Math 2 class, not generally. Two percent is still crazy low though, that's practically nothing.
> “Who is going to trust somebody who got a degree in airline engineering who doesn’t know how to think through a problem without a computer telling them the answer?”
What bewilders me is that I've read (maybe here on HN) that the issue with some of those planes is a lot of the key people who built the previous generations were moved around to different departments, and I'm just thinking to myself, are you guys going to get the right people in the right spots? This is embarrassing and downright evil if you aren't taking steps to ensure the quality of your aircrafts.
I read a great book about Boeing called Flying Blind by Peter Robinson about the 737 crisis and the downfall of Boeing, its main premise was how a toxic corporate culture took over, removed power from scientists, safety and engineers and gave power to lobbyists and MBA finance types. They pressure regulators to approve the 737 and rush production, skimping on safety and qualifications. The McDonnell Douglas merger poisoned Boeing’s culture as MBA style management replaced an engineering first culture and shifted priorities from “build the safest airplane in the world” to “hit aggressive quarterly targets.”
A key component was the move of corporate HQ and power base from Seattle to Chicago where the execs lived, wrestling it away from the engineers in Seattle. Later they moved their HQ again to Washington DC to be closer to lobbying!
Also the same seems to extend to things when private companies discussed. Nothing is enough you cannot be happy with company making million in post tax profit a year. Next year you must do two million, then 4 and 8 and so on... Even not attempting this is somehow failure for some people...
It feels more skewed for public companies for me. There's definitely "well off" small private companies that have good returns (mom and pop shops) and keep going and making their customers happy for decades, and those aren't an issue. There'll definitely be 'evil' private companies, but something about the stock market ruins companies. You are too dependent on the perception of your company and the markets reaction to it and your decisions. Investors do a lot of knee jerk selling. Meanwhile billionaires swoop in and purchase a chunk of your company at a discount.
Yeah I noticed any time original founders are replaced, companies degrade. The pride of running a good company just isn't there. That's not ALWAYS the case though. I have a relative who bought an AC repair company out, and made it into the amazing company that it is today.
Benefits of moving their HQ to Washington DC for closer proximity to lobbying starting to pay off! Relocating corporate to DC puts their execs within arm's reach of the ones who approve their contracts, oversee it's safety regulations and bail it out when the plane's software causes crashes.
What if USA would stop treating education like a business - customer paid for degree, customer gets the degree no matter if customer has essential knowledge for the degree?
Let's be clear though, there's quite a difference in doing problems related to working memory, mental computation, etc. under time constraints - usually what you get when taking standardized tests, aptitude tests, IQ tests, etc. - and solving "actual" real world math problems, like mathematical modelling, numerical methods, and what have you.
I'm sure if I walk around in the office and ask people a problem like "Car A starts driving south at time zero, with speed 30km/h. Car B is located 10 km down south and starts driving north 5 minutes later, at speed 45 km/h, at what time do they meet? You have 1 minute. Go." a bunch of them will start to sweat, and many will likely fail - even though they have graduate STEM degrees.
I did. My comment was to the “Who is going to trust somebody who got a degree in airline engineering who doesn’t know how to think through a problem without a computer telling them the answer?” comment in the article. Even if you suck at math when enrolling college, if you actually manage to get through some math-heavy STEM degree, you've probably learned the math through your studies.
I also did check out the paper, and it does indeed seem like the number of students that are placed into Math 2 (The lowest or second lowest placement if I read it correctly) has 20-fold increased in just 5 years, while most other Math placements have stayed somewhat stable, at least toward the top.
My conclusion is that the students that simply don't have the math knowledge to pursue STEM-degrees, will either not enter them, or finish them, so that might not be a huge problem? They'll purse other majors that don't require math.
My hunch is also that those that are not interested in math, have found shortcuts to get through their math classes the past 5 years (cheating? AI?). But, then again, what are the chances they'll actually end up working with anything math-related after college?
Maybe there are too many colleges if there's not enough qualified students. Perhaps save taxpayer money and downsize UCSD. Better have fewer, but qualified, students than load it up with people who shouldn't be there.
".....In 2020, system leaders voted to phase standardized-test scores out of admissions decisions. They argued that the tests worsened racial divides and unfairly privileged wealthy students. But SAT and ACT scores are the most reliable predictors of a student’s math ability, the report found...."
The war on admissions testing is one of the worst education trends. I couldn’t believe it when it was first proposed, but I was even more shocked when the trend started to spread.
It does appear to be reversing a little bit in some places as schools realize they were fooled by people pushing ideology over data and results, but it’s going to take a while.
For those who aren’t in the loop: There’s an ideological push to eliminate testing, aptitude tests, and even to eliminate different educational tracks (accelerated learning programs, AP classes, advanced math tracts) in the name of pursuing equality for everyone. The idea of testing people for aptitude or allowing some students to go into more advanced classes than others is not allowed by some ideologically-driven people who think all students must be given strictly equal education at every grade level.
University Education programs and as a result teaching bodies have been taken over by ideology.
I believe it is in part because all the teaching low hanging fruit has been established for centuries. So the only 'novel' things the programs can do is talk about discrimination, disparate outcomes and hand-wavey ideas about improving education. The departments have some of the lowest bars for academic professorship and as a result, the quality of research is similarly bad -> terrible.
The war on phonics is the canonical example.
The fault doesn't lie with 'people'. The above mentioned institutions are squarely at fault for making education ideological, and they should explicitly be blamed for the deterioration in student performance.
I wonder if college administrators are using discrimination as an excuse to decrease standards to increase number of students, which then increases their pay and job security. It is well known that not only did number of young people peak, but also that outside of the top 20 or so, college is nowhere near worth the tuition prices.
The only other option is for college administrators to be disturbingly stupid.
I don’t think it is about resources. Growing up in 3rd world country I have zero resources. It is the drive of student and higher standards from parents and teachers that matters. Everybody is just getting soft.
IMHO. It is futile to level the field with the wealthy. They will always have the better opportunities, education, connections, etc. They will find a way.
But we should keep trying to give more opportunities to the less fortunate. Better education, remedial classes, free school lunches, child credits, etc. We do that by asking the wealthy to contribute more. Not by taking away their advantages.(e.g. Admission tests)
> Not by taking away their advantages.(e.g. Admission tests)
Admissions tests are actually not as big of a driver for the academic advantage of the wealthy. Especially at flagship institutions a lot of it is simply traced back to legacy admissions, athletics, and extra-curricular activities. Those latter two are more gamed by the wealthy than anything.
Removing admission tests and focusing only on the application is actually a huge boon to wealthy families who want to get their children into the best universities because it removes the hard part (having to learn enough to do well in exams) and replaces it with things that are easy to game, like writing essays and getting a track record of doing extra-curriculars.
Standardized tests actually make it easier for lower income families to compete for spots for academically advanced children because they’re measuring academic advancement. Even if it’s not a perfect measure, it’s way better than substituting non-academic things that are so easily gamed by the wealthy.
I never thought about the ease at which you can game non-academic aspects. I agree that testing is probabamtic because a good tutor can boost peoples performance signficantly but there feels like a limit to actually just learning the material. Useful evalation metrics of people are notoriously difficult
I have never met a single person who wanted to learn advanced mathematics who was prevented from doing this by not getting into the college of their choice, and I know a lot of mathematicians. Do you genuinely believe that people who get an 800 on the math portion of the SATs (which is actually a pretty large number of people) are struggling to get admission to university at all?
The mathematicians I know wish the were introduced to more material when they were younger so they could spend more time internalizing different concepts before being forced to specialize by the demands of a PhD.
The more scientifically minded people I know wish they were introduced to more mathematical concepts when they were younger so they could feel more able applying more sophisticated models to their problem domain.
Having a pipeline of somewhat mathematically able citizens is crucial to having an advanced economy. I don’t think the preceding statement is remotely controversial.
They don’t. The movements pushing these ideas are against the idea of aptitude testing. Many of them are even against the idea of having advanced classes for those who are ahead.
It’s not a niche ideology, sadly. It’s going mainstream. A core part of Zohran Mamdani’s platform was his goal to phase out gifted education programs, for example.
Gifted education programs for kindergarten. I don't necessarily agree with that either but it's important to be accurate when talking about proposed policies. The man isn't talking about taking away AP algebra. Most kindergarteners still need to be told not to eat their boogers.
Kindergarten is where the phase out starts. That’s how you phase something out. You don’t take it away from everyone all at once because that triggers outrage. You disallow it for new kindergarten students one season, then next year remove it from 1st grade so they can’t go into accelerated programs and so on. He explicitly uses the phrase “phase out” for this reason.
Read more of his platform documents, including the ones before everything got watered down for his website.
The “it’s just for kindergarten” is just positive spin on the first step of the goal of phasing it out in general.
The phase out starts with kindergarten and “early grades”. In some places he’s said up through second grade which some assume is an upper limit, but really it’s just the natural length of phasing out gifted programs one year at a time over the 4-year course of a mayoral term due to the necessary delays to eliminate the program after his election date (kindergarten next school year, then 1st grade the next, then 2nd grade)
Assuming he wants to eliminate all gifted programs because he said he wants to eliminate some of them is a type of ZDS. You also edited your earlier comment to say
> You disallow it for new kindergarten students one season, then next year remove it from 1st grade so they can’t go into accelerated programs and so on
I don't know how it works in NYC now, but it doesn't have to be like that. When I went to school you could always get into the gifted program at the beginning of any school year if your teacher put you up for it. You didn't have to be in the program since kindergarten.
> I don't know how it works in NYC now, but it doesn't have to be like that. When I went to school you could always get into the gifted program at the beginning of any school year if your teacher put you up for it. You didn't have to be in the program since kindergarten.
Sorry, I should have been more clear.
The gifted program for kindergarten will be eliminated in the first year of the phaseout.
The following year it will also be eliminated for first grade.
The following year it will be eliminated for second grade as well.
This is the phase out. Students who start in kindergarten next year won’t have the option of the gifted program because it will be eliminated for the following grade every year.
It doesn’t matter that they didn’t get into it in Kindergarten because it won’t exist in 1st grade when they get there, and so on.
Up to what grade though? The article you provided says Mamdani supports gifted programs starting in the 3rd grade. That's different from your original assertion that he's "[phasing out] gifted education programs", implying that they would end completely for everyone.
My original understanding was it was kindergarten only and that was inaccurate. He's following a plan proposed by de Blasio, which I didn't know about, that's phasing it out up to the 2nd grade. Extrapolating from that to "Mamdani will remove all gifted education" is the ZDS I'm referring to.
I agree with you overall about the value of gifted programs. But it's important to not spiral into hyperbole.
There is a well-known effect where segregating kids into gifted VS non-gifted harms the education of the non-gifted while only having a marginal impact on the gifted:
Basically, non-gifted kids learn from the gifted ones. It's that whole, "positive influence from peers" thing.
In the long term, having gifted programs results in a handful of accelerated students and a lot more struggling ones (at the end of mandatory education).
> Basically, non-gifted kids learn from the gifted ones. It's that whole, "positive influence from peers" thing.
In other words, let’s drag the smart students down, disallow them a better education, and instead force them to teach their peers because we don’t think their teachers are doing a good job?
Honestly, nothing has done a better job of solidifying my understanding of a material than trying to explain it to other people. We should be giving students more opportunities to do this, not less.
On the contrary, the study you cite found no significant effect either way for either group. From the last page: "we find that gifted grouping does not help or hurt the
achievement growth of gifted students nor does it help or hurt the achievement
growth of non-gifted students"
(emphasis mine.) This certainly does not imply that separating gifted tracks results in a lot more struggling students.
I mean that's nice and all. But then you can also get behavioral issues from gifted students who feel stifled. Their needs aren't less important than the other students'.
Kids usually don't learn "school" things like math, reading, and science from each other. They learn behaviors. Kindness, cooperation, competition, integrity, working hard, not being disruptive etc. Having a gifted track for part of the day doesn't disrupt that learning.
There is a silver lining though, when everyone is in the same class, better off people don't think they can escape and push to make the program better for everyone.
Teachers only really teach the middle third - the top third can be ignored because they can do it for themselves while being bored.
The bottom third can’t be helped because they won’t be helped without a huge amount of energy by the teacher (for little rewards), and so won’t do it for themselves while being bored.
The middle third is all that gets schooled because they can at least be bumped up a little higher towards where the under-achieving top third thus rests.
> better off people don't think they can escape and push to make the program better for everyone.
Your solution is to make the smart kids suffer so maybe they can force the educators to do better? That’s insane. It’s also not going to happen.
Do you know what will happen? Any parent with the means will scrape together cash to pull their students out and go to private schools. Or they’ll hire tutors after school and force their kids to sit down and learn what they should have been learning during the day.
This fantasy where the smart kids rally together to overhaul the system because we banned them from taking advanced classes is a delusion.
I was in a gifted program in grades 5-7, stopped going mainly because I had to travel to another school to attend and it was inconvenient.
I didn't "suffer" being in classes with folks who weren't at my level. The teaching staff did a great job and I never felt like I was being shortchanged. My undiagnosed ADHD means I goofed around a lot, but several of my friends told me after high school that they appreciated me because I helped them see learning from a different angle than their parents or the teachers.
Great that it worked for you. I believe everyone should have the choice.
However, please don’t force your experience to be the only allowable experience for others. If some students want to take advanced classes, we should let them.
Refusing to allow students to learn at a faster rate is insanity.
But you can't tailor one program for kids with different abilities. You shouldn't even try. You should give each individual what they need to succeed to the best of their ability. That's the core of inclusion and equity. You know, the classic comic of the three kids trying to look over the fence?
AFAICT many private schools are worse than public schools. Parents put kids into private schools so that they get good grades and extra-curriculars to let them get into the good universities. So that's what private schools sell -- good grades. It's less important that they have the education that the good grades imply.
I have no doubt schools like that exist, but in every location I’ve lived and interacted with parents the private school educations they sent their kids to were no question a cut above.
I think this idea that private schools are no better are even worse is a wishful thinking narrative. Private schools, especially the more expensive ones, naturally select for parents who are more involved. More involved parents are highly correlated with better student outcomes. That alone means private schools are correlated with better outcomes. It honestly doesn’t really matter if it’s cause and effect or correlation, parents send their kids to private schools because they want them in the mix with other students selected into the higher performing environment.
>The average private school mean reading score was 14.7 points higher than the average public school mean reading score, corresponding to an effect size of .41 (the ratio of the absolute value of the estimated difference to the standard deviation of the NAEP fourth-grade reading score distribution). After adjusting for selected student characteristics, the difference in means was near zero and not significant.
For math:
>The average private school mean mathematics score was 7.8 points higher than the average public school mean mathematics score, corresponding to an effect size of .29. After adjusting for selected student characteristics, the difference in means was -4.5 and significantly different from zero. (Note that a negative difference implies that the average school mean was higher for public schools.)
In the context of the specific discussion here, it doesn't really matter that the effect goes away when controling for selected student characteristics. First off this was from 2006, we would have to see if any of that has changed. The 2024 numbers are here[1]. But in any case they are not worse than public schools, although they may be no better or slightly worse than a public school in a rich neighborhood or similar.
Considering private schools cost tens of thousands of dollars and get to choose who they admit, as good (in reading) and worse (in math) than schools with similar demographics seems pretty damning, doesn't it?
That’s why it isn’t a reliable indicator of aptitude. A student who earns all A’s at a top level public school and a student who earns all A’s at a low level public school aren’t necessarily operating at the same academic level.
They asked what else could be used. I told them, then I explained why it wouldn't work as well as a standardized test.
And the variance can happen even in "top level" public schools, for certain definitions of "top level". I went to one of the best high schools in the nation (as rated by college acceptance rates, SAT/ACT scores, etc). There were still teachers people wanted to avoid because they were seen as harsher graders. So you can have grade inflation even at "top level" schools as private schools aren't above selling grades.
Thank you, this answers the question I was going to pose in a comment: why did this supposedly selective university admit students who can’t do basic math? Maybe their grade wouldn’t reflect it, but surely a standardized test like SAT or ACT would have flagged this? Maybe instead of remedial courses, they should stop admitting unqualified students?
Standardized tests are reliable predictors of students' abilities to solve standardized tests, which is not necessarily a 1-1 correlation with aptitude in that field. It is much like how your ability to sort a binary tree in a development interview isn't a 1-1 correlation with your ability to effectively upgrade your production website's Angular to the latest version.
My wife works in private college admissions counseling, so I've been privy to a lot of conversations around these issues over the years.
The article is paywalled, but I feel that in this sentence the author is using all reasons used against standardized testing to criticize the elimination of standardized math testing.
The concerns around racial divides have been mainly in the non-math portion of the SAT's, where it's been found that students with a non-white background don't choose the "right" answer on ambiguous questions because they don't have the same shared experience that would make the "right" answer obvious to someone with a white background. Its inclusion here sounds like the author is trying to inject a little anti-woke hysteria into her argument.
Wealth leading to increased standardized test scores is a very real thing. Many of us have taken multiple choice tests where we've known that the best answer isn't necessarily the "right" answer, and that in order to pass the test we have to select the answer the test is looking for. The SAT and ACT are littered with these questions and there are test prep companies who have decades of industry knowledge that they provide their clients with to get a boost on their scores. No amount of non-profit or public school provided test prep can compete with that.
As someone else commented, someone with an 800 on their SAT math will get admitted 99 percent of the time. Colleges are always very open about their admissions criteria and students are always free to choose to apply or not based on those.
In the day job, how many people have to use maths skills beyond arithmetic?
What about trigonometry?
Differential equations?
Integration and calculus?
To be honest, if I am using Boolean Logic then that might as well be 'advanced mathematics', far beyond the comprehension of non-coders. Even simple trigonometry isn't so simple to most people.
Clearly we need some people on the planet able to do more than basic arithmetic, however, what is the point in trying to teach the whole population how to do differential equations given the lack of workplace opportunities to use such knowledge?
The why question isn't explained with maths beyond the theoretical 'yep, you will earn more'. Too many maths textbooks are utterly abstract, you might as well be learning cuneiform for the amount of practical use cases.
It seems to me that the policy makers and journalists that complain about the demise of maths skills aren't doing a lot of maths themselves yet they want to force maths on the masses, as if it was good for you in a 'eat your greens' type of way.
Maths is hard and it really does not suit a lot of people. Fluency in maths is only attainable by a few, the majority that can do maths need a lot of armbands, whether that be calculators, text books or internet crib sheets. Then there is everyone else, not even floundering, just giving it a miss.
Rather than forcing the entire population to be maths geniuses, which will never happen, maths needs to be a specialist subject chosen by those that know what it can be used for, and with ambitions to take a career path where maths happens.
You designed a new beautiful car - a cube 3 m by 3 because, why not? Very modern, has plenty of space. You can even install solar panels at the top to charge its batteries.
Now tell me, without differential equations:
* how it deforms at impact?
* how much more or less air resistance it has and how it depends on speed?
* how quickly solar panels can charge the battery given that charging speed is non-linear?
So you’ll end up building countless prototypes and crash them, run at different speeds and charge with different panels and battery types. 100 years later you find out that its shape is just not good.
In the meantime solving few simple differential equations and optimization problems would tell you the same.
Or something very close to programming. How do you add two empirically measured probability distributions describing how two teams perform?
1. A lot of math crops up in unexpected ways in everyday life. Trig in construction & wood working, calculus & integration when doing finance, &c.
2. It's not about teaching how to crunch numbers, it's also teaching general problem solving, and using tools to break down complex problems using your various tools to solve it. This translates directly to everyday life.
As a programmer we use calculus and integration all the time in performance testing and stats when we aggregate the data and pull insights. I have started getting into making canopies for events and I have todo a lot of trig to calculate the dimensions of the shapes before I send them to the printer. Hell I even use lots of my high school physics when I go to calculate the load to choose to right type of rope or metal wire and to determine if anchoring points are safe or not. We also use a lot math when calculating generator loads and building power grids for raves & festivals. I also do aerial circus and we use lots of physics when setting up rigging points and determining safety margins. Hell just having a basic physics understanding is really important to figure out if the carabiner you're using is going to kill you or not.
So yea math is really fucking important, and you do use it everyday even if it's just the problem solving it teaches.
> How much mathematics is needed anyway? In the day job, how many people have to use maths skills beyond arithmetic?
A lot. It's also pretty funny that your examples of useless math are 3 of the most concrete and directly applicable concepts in the entire set of human knowledge. Try, idk, ergodic Ramsey Theory next time.
> What about trigonometry?
Ever heard about FM radio? Or anything that takes a Fourier series? Anything using complex numbers? Game programming? Graphics? Positional encodings in large language models?
> Differential equations?
My brother in christ, literally Newton's second law.
> Integration and calculus?
Ever needed to numerically find the minimum of a function or solve an equation? Newton-Raphson? Literally all of machine learning?
The thing with math is that if you aren't familiar with the concepts then you don't know what you don't know.
My weird take is this: calculus and other sorts of advanced mathematics are cultural artifacts as much as they are tools and people should be exposed to them more or less for the same reasons that we are exposed to Shakespeare or the history of world religions: they are beautiful, and learning them changes us in positive ways.
One thing I've learned after most of a lifetime being smart is that being smart barely matters. It doesn't matter whether people are good at math or bad at it or smart. Most people never achieve fluency in most subjects. But children deserve to be taught math as a matter of basic dignity and eudemonia. The attitude that education is a pragmatic thing meant to achieve some end other than enrichment of the person is why the US is so fucked.
> For the past several years, America has been using its young people as lab rats in a sweeping, if not exactly thought-out, education experiment.
Good grief. No, it's just the pandemic. The kids whose middle school years got disrupted are behind on skills taught in middle school.
Can you squint and blame other things? Sure. But experimental education policies are hardly new ideas, and none of the nonsense from previous decades has shown an effect like this. If you want to show up to the game with a claim that it's some other effect, I want to see a big exposition of why it's not the obvious hypothesis at work.
It's covid, folks. And over the next 3-4 years the scores will bounce back (to much crowing in the media from whichever faction wants to claim credit). Write it down.
It’s a shame other commenters are so busy waging culture war that this explanation is being minimized and dismissed. I’m married to a high school teacher, and not only is there a super obvious cohort that spent 8th-9th grade playing Fortnite instead of learning algebra, their successors are doing a lot better. Sure, the current cohort of college students needs remedial math. Let’s acknowledge the cause, offer them remedial math, and move forward. It’s not a sign that the sky is falling. The sky fell five years ago and we borrowed against the future to fix it. It’s the future now and the bill is due.
Did you just read 5 words into the article and come to this conclusion? The article that the authors researched and told us it's been going on since before the pandemic?
Ah, their next article should be about the confidence of fools...
> But the national trend is very clear: America’s students are getting much worse at math. The decline started about a decade ago and sharply accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic.
So I, a "fool", read that and think: Hm... well if the article isn't giving numbers I'm going to take the "sharp acceleration" as a statement about magnitude and clearly infer that the pandemic is at fault.
Again, is the subject complicated? Sure. But education policy doesn't produce effects like this. It never has, probably never will, and the article even doesn't claim it does.
You know what does produce effects like this? Keeping 13-year-olds out of class for two years.
I mean, come on. I repeat: write it down, in 4 years we'll all be reading about the miracle of American education policy. And that will be wrong too.
You're hand wavy "it's the pandemic" neglects the other evidence provided in the article that happens to coincide with the pandemic such as the elimination of test scores as admissions criteria to many universities. And the article certainly doesn't blame it wholly on the pandemic, for example here are two theories it presents:
> How did this happen? One theory is that the attention-shredding influence of phones and social media is to blame. The dip in math scores coincides with the widespread adoption of smartphones; by 2015, nearly three-quarters of high-school-aged kids had access to one. A related possibility is that technology is making students complacent. Emelianenko told me that students “are just not engaged in math classes anymore”; they seem to believe that they don’t need to learn math, because they can use AI instead.
> Or maybe students have stopped achieving in math because schools have stopped demanding it of them. During the George W. Bush administration, federal policy emphasized accountability for public schools. Schools that saw poor performance on standardized tests received increased funding at first, but if scores still didn’t improve, they had their funding pulled. Research suggests that this helped improve math outcomes, particularly for poor Black students. After 2015, however, the federal government backed off from its accountability measures, which had faced bipartisan criticism. (Some teachers’ unions and progressive parents wanted less emphasis on standardized tests, and some conservative politicians wanted the federal government to remove itself from education policy.) Many schools across the country have shifted toward making math engaging for students at the expense of evidence-based teaching practices. And due to funding shortages or misguided efforts to improve equity, many students are held back from taking the hardest math courses.
> You're hand wavy "it's the pandemic" neglects the other evidence provided
There was no significant other evidence. And "hand wavy" is missing the point. There is a bleedingly obvious hypothesis for this effect with huge signal in all sorts of other areas of social policy. I mean, really? The pandemic is visible in every measurable segment of society but somehow not a major factor in education results?
In some sense, yes, Occam's Razor is a principle that embraces "hand wavy" understanding by demanding extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims. And I think it's going to work very well here. Again, for the third time: write it down. In four years this will all bounce back.
What's happening here is actually a different logical fallacy entirely. HN commenters have a distinct ideological bent against new ("woke") ideas in education. And they're willing to ignore things like giant global pandemics to chase their preferred explanations.
so is the saying "could care less", but both are wrong and indicative of some kind of low level neurological deficit, possibly lead contamination or something similar
https://archive.is/fPJiW
> “Who is going to trust somebody who got a degree in airline engineering who doesn’t know how to think through a problem without a computer telling them the answer?”
Years ago when I was working in education (Canadian public schools) our school board had a conference ahead of the school year. The keynote was an inclusive-ed researcher / consultant / speaker who told an anecdote of how they had successfully lobbied for a student with a substantive intellectual disability to be registered for the high school physics courses.
Part of the anecdote was pushback from the physics head: "I've known Jake for years. Great kid. But what is he supposed to get out of physics class?"
The consultant's in-anecdote response: "what is anybody supposed to get out of physics class?"
Wild laughter and applause.
---
A surprising number of people in education seem to simply not know that there is substantive and consequential content in the curriculum.
Having never really learned math, they've never really used it. Having never used it, they don't recognize its utility.
They seem to earnestly believe that it isn't an actual tool but a gatekeeping mechanism devised by autistic persons to humiliate normies.
The anecdote I heard was a grade-school teacher admitting they had never used the Pythagorean formula IRL.
Well, no fucking shit, Sherlock! You aren't the sort of person to turn to math to solve problems. You're the sort of homesy chuckle-cluck who puts up inspirational posters on your bedroom wall.
OTOH, I've been on my back in an attic with a house builder, and calculated the 3-dimensional length of the bizarre edges of a skylight (where the ceiling opening was completely skew to the roof opening). We absolutely used math to solve the problem.
That grade school teacher? They wouldn't have been asked to check the calculations. The carpenter? Used math IRL.
Are there degrees in “airline engineering?”
>They seem to earnestly believe that it isn't an actual tool but a gatekeeping mechanism devised by autistic persons to humiliate normies.
it should be that, though.
A learned language is often lost without regular repetitive practice. People often either become overly specialized in some area, or end up teaching basic-theory while regretting their life choices.
In time, most figure out people create pet mathematical fictions regardless of background, and while authoritative confident liars often allow people to feel better about uncertainty... it adds little value in the long-term. =3
To be fair no one ever takes a moment to show you what the math is useful for. You're just expected to learn it because it's said to be important.
I'm not sure why this is down-voted. Nearly every single teacher I had from elementary though high school, when asked what was the usefulness of the math lesson, said that we would need it when we got to the next level of education. Elementary teachers said we would need it in middle school. Middle school teachers said we would need it in high school. High school teachers said we would need it in college. By college you learned to stop asking questions.
I'm lucky I enjoyed math and science, but I'm not surprised that people who don't enjoy it think it isn't going to be useful to them. It's very much one of the things that if you don't know how to apply it, you won't find the places to apply it, so you end up thinking it has no use.
Word. I got taught matrix multiplication in high school without any context. "Here's a grid of numbers kid. Go do some elementary school arithmetic on all of them. No it's not Sudoku I promise".
If only I'd know how important matrix multiplication would turn out to be...
The UCSD report shows some of the questions they asked incoming students.
39% got this right:
34% got this right: 2% got this right: https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissio... page 49A shocking number of Americans are also functionally illiterate. I think 21% or about 41 million Muricans.
54% of Americans read below a 6th grade level.
We don't need to know how to do these things when we can just have someone/something do it for us.
To be fair, the ÷ symbol for division must be abolished.
To clarify, these are percentages for the sample of students taking the remedial Math 2 class, not generally. Two percent is still crazy low though, that's practically nothing.
A yep that's a critical piece of information.
For context, "In the 2025 incoming class, this group constitutes roughly one-eighth of our entire entering cohort."
> “Who is going to trust somebody who got a degree in airline engineering who doesn’t know how to think through a problem without a computer telling them the answer?”
I think the answer is Boeing
What bewilders me is that I've read (maybe here on HN) that the issue with some of those planes is a lot of the key people who built the previous generations were moved around to different departments, and I'm just thinking to myself, are you guys going to get the right people in the right spots? This is embarrassing and downright evil if you aren't taking steps to ensure the quality of your aircrafts.
I read a great book about Boeing called Flying Blind by Peter Robinson about the 737 crisis and the downfall of Boeing, its main premise was how a toxic corporate culture took over, removed power from scientists, safety and engineers and gave power to lobbyists and MBA finance types. They pressure regulators to approve the 737 and rush production, skimping on safety and qualifications. The McDonnell Douglas merger poisoned Boeing’s culture as MBA style management replaced an engineering first culture and shifted priorities from “build the safest airplane in the world” to “hit aggressive quarterly targets.”
A key component was the move of corporate HQ and power base from Seattle to Chicago where the execs lived, wrestling it away from the engineers in Seattle. Later they moved their HQ again to Washington DC to be closer to lobbying!
It's a publicly traded company that is enslaved to it's investors, growth, profit and quarterly reporting.
The more time passes the more I hate publicly traded companies. I feel like the stock market rots companies.
Also the same seems to extend to things when private companies discussed. Nothing is enough you cannot be happy with company making million in post tax profit a year. Next year you must do two million, then 4 and 8 and so on... Even not attempting this is somehow failure for some people...
It feels more skewed for public companies for me. There's definitely "well off" small private companies that have good returns (mom and pop shops) and keep going and making their customers happy for decades, and those aren't an issue. There'll definitely be 'evil' private companies, but something about the stock market ruins companies. You are too dependent on the perception of your company and the markets reaction to it and your decisions. Investors do a lot of knee jerk selling. Meanwhile billionaires swoop in and purchase a chunk of your company at a discount.
Then mom and pop retire, the shop is sold to PE, and they do the same thing as a public company.
Yeah I noticed any time original founders are replaced, companies degrade. The pride of running a good company just isn't there. That's not ALWAYS the case though. I have a relative who bought an AC repair company out, and made it into the amazing company that it is today.
Ironically enough, they just got a Pentagon contract for 6th generation fighters.
Benefits of moving their HQ to Washington DC for closer proximity to lobbying starting to pay off! Relocating corporate to DC puts their execs within arm's reach of the ones who approve their contracts, oversee it's safety regulations and bail it out when the plane's software causes crashes.
Sadly and surprisingly, the quality and lifetime costs of the finished product is completely irrelevant here.
Yet this product is also the cornerstone of our national defense infrastructure.
As long as odd college students can still do math, it's not a big problem.
rolls eyes
I unfortunately have to upvote this.
What if USA would stop treating education like a business - customer paid for degree, customer gets the degree no matter if customer has essential knowledge for the degree?
What if we publicly acknowledged it's a key infrastructure to our economy, government, and society?
Wait ... you can't mean ... and pay for it? Am I in a bad dream? Or perhaps a really good one?
Thats close to what I was going to say: the answer to the prompt in the headline is clearly "don't admit them to college".
But since there is a massive profit motive to admit and keep young fools taking on student loans, I doubt that's the answer the industry would adopt
Or as Munger said "show me the incentive and I'll show you the behavior"
Let's be clear though, there's quite a difference in doing problems related to working memory, mental computation, etc. under time constraints - usually what you get when taking standardized tests, aptitude tests, IQ tests, etc. - and solving "actual" real world math problems, like mathematical modelling, numerical methods, and what have you.
I'm sure if I walk around in the office and ask people a problem like "Car A starts driving south at time zero, with speed 30km/h. Car B is located 10 km down south and starts driving north 5 minutes later, at speed 45 km/h, at what time do they meet? You have 1 minute. Go." a bunch of them will start to sweat, and many will likely fail - even though they have graduate STEM degrees.
Did you read the article? These kids can't even divide a fraction in half. It's basic numeracy and foundational skills that are missing.
I did. My comment was to the “Who is going to trust somebody who got a degree in airline engineering who doesn’t know how to think through a problem without a computer telling them the answer?” comment in the article. Even if you suck at math when enrolling college, if you actually manage to get through some math-heavy STEM degree, you've probably learned the math through your studies.
I also did check out the paper, and it does indeed seem like the number of students that are placed into Math 2 (The lowest or second lowest placement if I read it correctly) has 20-fold increased in just 5 years, while most other Math placements have stayed somewhat stable, at least toward the top.
My conclusion is that the students that simply don't have the math knowledge to pursue STEM-degrees, will either not enter them, or finish them, so that might not be a huge problem? They'll purse other majors that don't require math.
My hunch is also that those that are not interested in math, have found shortcuts to get through their math classes the past 5 years (cheating? AI?). But, then again, what are the chances they'll actually end up working with anything math-related after college?
Maybe there are too many colleges if there's not enough qualified students. Perhaps save taxpayer money and downsize UCSD. Better have fewer, but qualified, students than load it up with people who shouldn't be there.
False dichotomy.
https://archive.ph/QxAwK
We need to redefine math as procedural logic (like imperative programming for humans).
That way, we can defend the study of mathematics as a form of discipline for the human mind that has benefits beyond the knowledge gained.
The meta-process for solving any mathematical problem is the same as any other form of project management.
Or maybe we should first try to teach kids the value of project management & then try to get them to apply those principles to math problems?
".....In 2020, system leaders voted to phase standardized-test scores out of admissions decisions. They argued that the tests worsened racial divides and unfairly privileged wealthy students. But SAT and ACT scores are the most reliable predictors of a student’s math ability, the report found...."
The war on admissions testing is one of the worst education trends. I couldn’t believe it when it was first proposed, but I was even more shocked when the trend started to spread.
It does appear to be reversing a little bit in some places as schools realize they were fooled by people pushing ideology over data and results, but it’s going to take a while.
For those who aren’t in the loop: There’s an ideological push to eliminate testing, aptitude tests, and even to eliminate different educational tracks (accelerated learning programs, AP classes, advanced math tracts) in the name of pursuing equality for everyone. The idea of testing people for aptitude or allowing some students to go into more advanced classes than others is not allowed by some ideologically-driven people who think all students must be given strictly equal education at every grade level.
It goes deeper. The problem lies at the source.
> people pushing ideology
University Education programs and as a result teaching bodies have been taken over by ideology.
I believe it is in part because all the teaching low hanging fruit has been established for centuries. So the only 'novel' things the programs can do is talk about discrimination, disparate outcomes and hand-wavey ideas about improving education. The departments have some of the lowest bars for academic professorship and as a result, the quality of research is similarly bad -> terrible.
The war on phonics is the canonical example.
The fault doesn't lie with 'people'. The above mentioned institutions are squarely at fault for making education ideological, and they should explicitly be blamed for the deterioration in student performance.
Kurt Vonnegut saw this trend emerging back in 1961:
https://archive.org/stream/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Berge...
There's a charming TV movie adaptation of this story.
I wonder if college administrators are using discrimination as an excuse to decrease standards to increase number of students, which then increases their pay and job security. It is well known that not only did number of young people peak, but also that outside of the top 20 or so, college is nowhere near worth the tuition prices.
The only other option is for college administrators to be disturbingly stupid.
Imagine still will be all the advanced tracks but will be only reserved for those with the resources to afford it and seemingly further the divide.
I don’t think it is about resources. Growing up in 3rd world country I have zero resources. It is the drive of student and higher standards from parents and teachers that matters. Everybody is just getting soft.
> I don’t think it is about resources. Growing up in 3rd world country I have zero resources.
In America many parents do have resources, though, and they will spend those on private schools, tutoring, or home schooling.
> It is the drive of student and higher standards from parents and teachers that matters.
These proposals restrict the teachers and disallow teaching advanced subjects to students with drive to learn them.
You can’t say it’s up to the students and teachers while also holding back the students and restricting the teachers.
IMHO. It is futile to level the field with the wealthy. They will always have the better opportunities, education, connections, etc. They will find a way.
But we should keep trying to give more opportunities to the less fortunate. Better education, remedial classes, free school lunches, child credits, etc. We do that by asking the wealthy to contribute more. Not by taking away their advantages.(e.g. Admission tests)
> Not by taking away their advantages.(e.g. Admission tests)
Admissions tests are actually not as big of a driver for the academic advantage of the wealthy. Especially at flagship institutions a lot of it is simply traced back to legacy admissions, athletics, and extra-curricular activities. Those latter two are more gamed by the wealthy than anything.
Removing admission tests and focusing only on the application is actually a huge boon to wealthy families who want to get their children into the best universities because it removes the hard part (having to learn enough to do well in exams) and replaces it with things that are easy to game, like writing essays and getting a track record of doing extra-curriculars.
Standardized tests actually make it easier for lower income families to compete for spots for academically advanced children because they’re measuring academic advancement. Even if it’s not a perfect measure, it’s way better than substituting non-academic things that are so easily gamed by the wealthy.
I never thought about the ease at which you can game non-academic aspects. I agree that testing is probabamtic because a good tutor can boost peoples performance signficantly but there feels like a limit to actually just learning the material. Useful evalation metrics of people are notoriously difficult
I have never met a single person who wanted to learn advanced mathematics who was prevented from doing this by not getting into the college of their choice, and I know a lot of mathematicians. Do you genuinely believe that people who get an 800 on the math portion of the SATs (which is actually a pretty large number of people) are struggling to get admission to university at all?
The mathematicians I know wish the were introduced to more material when they were younger so they could spend more time internalizing different concepts before being forced to specialize by the demands of a PhD.
The more scientifically minded people I know wish they were introduced to more mathematical concepts when they were younger so they could feel more able applying more sophisticated models to their problem domain.
Having a pipeline of somewhat mathematically able citizens is crucial to having an advanced economy. I don’t think the preceding statement is remotely controversial.
"But SAT and ACT scores are the most reliable predictors of a student’s math ability, the report found...."
how else do they gauge someone's math ability then?
They don’t. The movements pushing these ideas are against the idea of aptitude testing. Many of them are even against the idea of having advanced classes for those who are ahead.
It’s not a niche ideology, sadly. It’s going mainstream. A core part of Zohran Mamdani’s platform was his goal to phase out gifted education programs, for example.
> his goal to phase out gifted education programs
Gifted education programs for kindergarten. I don't necessarily agree with that either but it's important to be accurate when talking about proposed policies. The man isn't talking about taking away AP algebra. Most kindergarteners still need to be told not to eat their boogers.
“Phase out” means gradually remove.
Kindergarten is where the phase out starts. That’s how you phase something out. You don’t take it away from everyone all at once because that triggers outrage. You disallow it for new kindergarten students one season, then next year remove it from 1st grade so they can’t go into accelerated programs and so on. He explicitly uses the phrase “phase out” for this reason.
Read more of his platform documents, including the ones before everything got watered down for his website.
The “it’s just for kindergarten” is just positive spin on the first step of the goal of phasing it out in general.
> Read more of his platform documents, including the ones before everything got watered down for his website
Do you have links?
It’s been his statement all over: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/nyregion/mamdani-schools-...
The phase out starts with kindergarten and “early grades”. In some places he’s said up through second grade which some assume is an upper limit, but really it’s just the natural length of phasing out gifted programs one year at a time over the 4-year course of a mayoral term due to the necessary delays to eliminate the program after his election date (kindergarten next school year, then 1st grade the next, then 2nd grade)
Assuming he wants to eliminate all gifted programs because he said he wants to eliminate some of them is a type of ZDS. You also edited your earlier comment to say
> You disallow it for new kindergarten students one season, then next year remove it from 1st grade so they can’t go into accelerated programs and so on
I don't know how it works in NYC now, but it doesn't have to be like that. When I went to school you could always get into the gifted program at the beginning of any school year if your teacher put you up for it. You didn't have to be in the program since kindergarten.
> I don't know how it works in NYC now, but it doesn't have to be like that. When I went to school you could always get into the gifted program at the beginning of any school year if your teacher put you up for it. You didn't have to be in the program since kindergarten.
Sorry, I should have been more clear.
The gifted program for kindergarten will be eliminated in the first year of the phaseout.
The following year it will also be eliminated for first grade.
The following year it will be eliminated for second grade as well.
This is the phase out. Students who start in kindergarten next year won’t have the option of the gifted program because it will be eliminated for the following grade every year.
It doesn’t matter that they didn’t get into it in Kindergarten because it won’t exist in 1st grade when they get there, and so on.
It’s not “ZDS”. It’s literally what he’s said.
> and so on.
Up to what grade though? The article you provided says Mamdani supports gifted programs starting in the 3rd grade. That's different from your original assertion that he's "[phasing out] gifted education programs", implying that they would end completely for everyone.
My original understanding was it was kindergarten only and that was inaccurate. He's following a plan proposed by de Blasio, which I didn't know about, that's phasing it out up to the 2nd grade. Extrapolating from that to "Mamdani will remove all gifted education" is the ZDS I'm referring to.
I agree with you overall about the value of gifted programs. But it's important to not spiral into hyperbole.
There is a well-known effect where segregating kids into gifted VS non-gifted harms the education of the non-gifted while only having a marginal impact on the gifted:
https://ncrge.uconn.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/982/2019/04...
Basically, non-gifted kids learn from the gifted ones. It's that whole, "positive influence from peers" thing.
In the long term, having gifted programs results in a handful of accelerated students and a lot more struggling ones (at the end of mandatory education).
> Basically, non-gifted kids learn from the gifted ones. It's that whole, "positive influence from peers" thing.
In other words, let’s drag the smart students down, disallow them a better education, and instead force them to teach their peers because we don’t think their teachers are doing a good job?
This is a terrible way to solve a problem.
Honestly, nothing has done a better job of solidifying my understanding of a material than trying to explain it to other people. We should be giving students more opportunities to do this, not less.
How does giving some students AP classes take away their opportunity to tutor other classmates? Do they not have friends in the non-gifted track?
That’s fallacious.
The students won’t get a chance to learn the advanced material by examining it to others because they won’t be allowed to learn the advanced material.
How do people not see the harms in banning advanced classes?
You're presupposing that the only possible way to provide enrichment is by tracking people into advanced classes.
On the contrary, the study you cite found no significant effect either way for either group. From the last page: "we find that gifted grouping does not help or hurt the achievement growth of gifted students nor does it help or hurt the achievement growth of non-gifted students" (emphasis mine.) This certainly does not imply that separating gifted tracks results in a lot more struggling students.
Thank you! It’s perpetually frustrating that so many have come up with false ideas about gifted programs hurting other student.
Allowing advanced students to learn advanced topics should be an easy decision for everyone. It’s so strange that it’s become a contentious topic.
I mean that's nice and all. But then you can also get behavioral issues from gifted students who feel stifled. Their needs aren't less important than the other students'.
Kids usually don't learn "school" things like math, reading, and science from each other. They learn behaviors. Kindness, cooperation, competition, integrity, working hard, not being disruptive etc. Having a gifted track for part of the day doesn't disrupt that learning.
Even though he personally benefited from them. Pull up the ladder!
There is a silver lining though, when everyone is in the same class, better off people don't think they can escape and push to make the program better for everyone.
Nah, they get dragged down and ignored.
Teachers only really teach the middle third - the top third can be ignored because they can do it for themselves while being bored.
The bottom third can’t be helped because they won’t be helped without a huge amount of energy by the teacher (for little rewards), and so won’t do it for themselves while being bored.
The middle third is all that gets schooled because they can at least be bumped up a little higher towards where the under-achieving top third thus rests.
> better off people don't think they can escape and push to make the program better for everyone.
Your solution is to make the smart kids suffer so maybe they can force the educators to do better? That’s insane. It’s also not going to happen.
Do you know what will happen? Any parent with the means will scrape together cash to pull their students out and go to private schools. Or they’ll hire tutors after school and force their kids to sit down and learn what they should have been learning during the day.
This fantasy where the smart kids rally together to overhaul the system because we banned them from taking advanced classes is a delusion.
This gives off "I Am Very Smart" vibes.
I was in a gifted program in grades 5-7, stopped going mainly because I had to travel to another school to attend and it was inconvenient.
I didn't "suffer" being in classes with folks who weren't at my level. The teaching staff did a great job and I never felt like I was being shortchanged. My undiagnosed ADHD means I goofed around a lot, but several of my friends told me after high school that they appreciated me because I helped them see learning from a different angle than their parents or the teachers.
Great that it worked for you. I believe everyone should have the choice.
However, please don’t force your experience to be the only allowable experience for others. If some students want to take advanced classes, we should let them.
Refusing to allow students to learn at a faster rate is insanity.
But you can't tailor one program for kids with different abilities. You shouldn't even try. You should give each individual what they need to succeed to the best of their ability. That's the core of inclusion and equity. You know, the classic comic of the three kids trying to look over the fence?
They can and do. Private schools already exist.
AFAICT many private schools are worse than public schools. Parents put kids into private schools so that they get good grades and extra-curriculars to let them get into the good universities. So that's what private schools sell -- good grades. It's less important that they have the education that the good grades imply.
I have no doubt schools like that exist, but in every location I’ve lived and interacted with parents the private school educations they sent their kids to were no question a cut above.
I think this idea that private schools are no better are even worse is a wishful thinking narrative. Private schools, especially the more expensive ones, naturally select for parents who are more involved. More involved parents are highly correlated with better student outcomes. That alone means private schools are correlated with better outcomes. It honestly doesn’t really matter if it’s cause and effect or correlation, parents send their kids to private schools because they want them in the mix with other students selected into the higher performing environment.
They do perform better on average
>The average private school mean reading score was 14.7 points higher than the average public school mean reading score, corresponding to an effect size of .41 (the ratio of the absolute value of the estimated difference to the standard deviation of the NAEP fourth-grade reading score distribution). After adjusting for selected student characteristics, the difference in means was near zero and not significant.
For math:
>The average private school mean mathematics score was 7.8 points higher than the average public school mean mathematics score, corresponding to an effect size of .29. After adjusting for selected student characteristics, the difference in means was -4.5 and significantly different from zero. (Note that a negative difference implies that the average school mean was higher for public schools.)
In the context of the specific discussion here, it doesn't really matter that the effect goes away when controling for selected student characteristics. First off this was from 2006, we would have to see if any of that has changed. The 2024 numbers are here[1]. But in any case they are not worse than public schools, although they may be no better or slightly worse than a public school in a rich neighborhood or similar.
[0] https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/studies/2006461.a...
[1] https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/dashboards/schools_dashboa...
Considering private schools cost tens of thousands of dollars and get to choose who they admit, as good (in reading) and worse (in math) than schools with similar demographics seems pretty damning, doesn't it?
You can’t have a good teaching programme when there is a variance of 40 points of IQ among the pupils.
One could use course grades. The problem with that is the variance in instructor quality between institutions.
That’s why it isn’t a reliable indicator of aptitude. A student who earns all A’s at a top level public school and a student who earns all A’s at a low level public school aren’t necessarily operating at the same academic level.
They asked what else could be used. I told them, then I explained why it wouldn't work as well as a standardized test.
And the variance can happen even in "top level" public schools, for certain definitions of "top level". I went to one of the best high schools in the nation (as rated by college acceptance rates, SAT/ACT scores, etc). There were still teachers people wanted to avoid because they were seen as harsher graders. So you can have grade inflation even at "top level" schools as private schools aren't above selling grades.
Of course you can have grade inflation at top level schools, but there is a reason that they are considered "top level" in the first place.
Gauging someone’s abilities is meany mean.
Thank you, this answers the question I was going to pose in a comment: why did this supposedly selective university admit students who can’t do basic math? Maybe their grade wouldn’t reflect it, but surely a standardized test like SAT or ACT would have flagged this? Maybe instead of remedial courses, they should stop admitting unqualified students?
Standardized tests are reliable predictors of students' abilities to solve standardized tests, which is not necessarily a 1-1 correlation with aptitude in that field. It is much like how your ability to sort a binary tree in a development interview isn't a 1-1 correlation with your ability to effectively upgrade your production website's Angular to the latest version.
My wife works in private college admissions counseling, so I've been privy to a lot of conversations around these issues over the years.
The article is paywalled, but I feel that in this sentence the author is using all reasons used against standardized testing to criticize the elimination of standardized math testing.
The concerns around racial divides have been mainly in the non-math portion of the SAT's, where it's been found that students with a non-white background don't choose the "right" answer on ambiguous questions because they don't have the same shared experience that would make the "right" answer obvious to someone with a white background. Its inclusion here sounds like the author is trying to inject a little anti-woke hysteria into her argument.
Wealth leading to increased standardized test scores is a very real thing. Many of us have taken multiple choice tests where we've known that the best answer isn't necessarily the "right" answer, and that in order to pass the test we have to select the answer the test is looking for. The SAT and ACT are littered with these questions and there are test prep companies who have decades of industry knowledge that they provide their clients with to get a boost on their scores. No amount of non-profit or public school provided test prep can compete with that.
As someone else commented, someone with an 800 on their SAT math will get admitted 99 percent of the time. Colleges are always very open about their admissions criteria and students are always free to choose to apply or not based on those.
They can do math?
How much mathematics is needed anyway?
In the day job, how many people have to use maths skills beyond arithmetic?
What about trigonometry?
Differential equations?
Integration and calculus?
To be honest, if I am using Boolean Logic then that might as well be 'advanced mathematics', far beyond the comprehension of non-coders. Even simple trigonometry isn't so simple to most people.
Clearly we need some people on the planet able to do more than basic arithmetic, however, what is the point in trying to teach the whole population how to do differential equations given the lack of workplace opportunities to use such knowledge?
The why question isn't explained with maths beyond the theoretical 'yep, you will earn more'. Too many maths textbooks are utterly abstract, you might as well be learning cuneiform for the amount of practical use cases.
It seems to me that the policy makers and journalists that complain about the demise of maths skills aren't doing a lot of maths themselves yet they want to force maths on the masses, as if it was good for you in a 'eat your greens' type of way.
Maths is hard and it really does not suit a lot of people. Fluency in maths is only attainable by a few, the majority that can do maths need a lot of armbands, whether that be calculators, text books or internet crib sheets. Then there is everyone else, not even floundering, just giving it a miss.
Rather than forcing the entire population to be maths geniuses, which will never happen, maths needs to be a specialist subject chosen by those that know what it can be used for, and with ambitions to take a career path where maths happens.
You designed a new beautiful car - a cube 3 m by 3 because, why not? Very modern, has plenty of space. You can even install solar panels at the top to charge its batteries.
Now tell me, without differential equations: * how it deforms at impact? * how much more or less air resistance it has and how it depends on speed? * how quickly solar panels can charge the battery given that charging speed is non-linear?
So you’ll end up building countless prototypes and crash them, run at different speeds and charge with different panels and battery types. 100 years later you find out that its shape is just not good.
In the meantime solving few simple differential equations and optimization problems would tell you the same.
Or something very close to programming. How do you add two empirically measured probability distributions describing how two teams perform?
1. A lot of math crops up in unexpected ways in everyday life. Trig in construction & wood working, calculus & integration when doing finance, &c.
2. It's not about teaching how to crunch numbers, it's also teaching general problem solving, and using tools to break down complex problems using your various tools to solve it. This translates directly to everyday life.
As a programmer we use calculus and integration all the time in performance testing and stats when we aggregate the data and pull insights. I have started getting into making canopies for events and I have todo a lot of trig to calculate the dimensions of the shapes before I send them to the printer. Hell I even use lots of my high school physics when I go to calculate the load to choose to right type of rope or metal wire and to determine if anchoring points are safe or not. We also use a lot math when calculating generator loads and building power grids for raves & festivals. I also do aerial circus and we use lots of physics when setting up rigging points and determining safety margins. Hell just having a basic physics understanding is really important to figure out if the carabiner you're using is going to kill you or not.
So yea math is really fucking important, and you do use it everyday even if it's just the problem solving it teaches.
> How much mathematics is needed anyway? In the day job, how many people have to use maths skills beyond arithmetic?
A lot. It's also pretty funny that your examples of useless math are 3 of the most concrete and directly applicable concepts in the entire set of human knowledge. Try, idk, ergodic Ramsey Theory next time.
> What about trigonometry?
Ever heard about FM radio? Or anything that takes a Fourier series? Anything using complex numbers? Game programming? Graphics? Positional encodings in large language models?
> Differential equations?
My brother in christ, literally Newton's second law.
> Integration and calculus?
Ever needed to numerically find the minimum of a function or solve an equation? Newton-Raphson? Literally all of machine learning?
The thing with math is that if you aren't familiar with the concepts then you don't know what you don't know.
A truly epic weird take.
My weird take is this: calculus and other sorts of advanced mathematics are cultural artifacts as much as they are tools and people should be exposed to them more or less for the same reasons that we are exposed to Shakespeare or the history of world religions: they are beautiful, and learning them changes us in positive ways.
One thing I've learned after most of a lifetime being smart is that being smart barely matters. It doesn't matter whether people are good at math or bad at it or smart. Most people never achieve fluency in most subjects. But children deserve to be taught math as a matter of basic dignity and eudemonia. The attitude that education is a pragmatic thing meant to achieve some end other than enrichment of the person is why the US is so fucked.
You don't work in production, engineering, or finance, do you?
Embarassing Occam's failure in the lede:
> For the past several years, America has been using its young people as lab rats in a sweeping, if not exactly thought-out, education experiment.
Good grief. No, it's just the pandemic. The kids whose middle school years got disrupted are behind on skills taught in middle school.
Can you squint and blame other things? Sure. But experimental education policies are hardly new ideas, and none of the nonsense from previous decades has shown an effect like this. If you want to show up to the game with a claim that it's some other effect, I want to see a big exposition of why it's not the obvious hypothesis at work.
It's covid, folks. And over the next 3-4 years the scores will bounce back (to much crowing in the media from whichever faction wants to claim credit). Write it down.
It’s a shame other commenters are so busy waging culture war that this explanation is being minimized and dismissed. I’m married to a high school teacher, and not only is there a super obvious cohort that spent 8th-9th grade playing Fortnite instead of learning algebra, their successors are doing a lot better. Sure, the current cohort of college students needs remedial math. Let’s acknowledge the cause, offer them remedial math, and move forward. It’s not a sign that the sky is falling. The sky fell five years ago and we borrowed against the future to fix it. It’s the future now and the bill is due.
Did you just read 5 words into the article and come to this conclusion? The article that the authors researched and told us it's been going on since before the pandemic?
Ah, their next article should be about the confidence of fools...
I did! Here's the quote:
> But the national trend is very clear: America’s students are getting much worse at math. The decline started about a decade ago and sharply accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic.
So I, a "fool", read that and think: Hm... well if the article isn't giving numbers I'm going to take the "sharp acceleration" as a statement about magnitude and clearly infer that the pandemic is at fault.
Again, is the subject complicated? Sure. But education policy doesn't produce effects like this. It never has, probably never will, and the article even doesn't claim it does.
You know what does produce effects like this? Keeping 13-year-olds out of class for two years.
I mean, come on. I repeat: write it down, in 4 years we'll all be reading about the miracle of American education policy. And that will be wrong too.
You're hand wavy "it's the pandemic" neglects the other evidence provided in the article that happens to coincide with the pandemic such as the elimination of test scores as admissions criteria to many universities. And the article certainly doesn't blame it wholly on the pandemic, for example here are two theories it presents:
> How did this happen? One theory is that the attention-shredding influence of phones and social media is to blame. The dip in math scores coincides with the widespread adoption of smartphones; by 2015, nearly three-quarters of high-school-aged kids had access to one. A related possibility is that technology is making students complacent. Emelianenko told me that students “are just not engaged in math classes anymore”; they seem to believe that they don’t need to learn math, because they can use AI instead.
> Or maybe students have stopped achieving in math because schools have stopped demanding it of them. During the George W. Bush administration, federal policy emphasized accountability for public schools. Schools that saw poor performance on standardized tests received increased funding at first, but if scores still didn’t improve, they had their funding pulled. Research suggests that this helped improve math outcomes, particularly for poor Black students. After 2015, however, the federal government backed off from its accountability measures, which had faced bipartisan criticism. (Some teachers’ unions and progressive parents wanted less emphasis on standardized tests, and some conservative politicians wanted the federal government to remove itself from education policy.) Many schools across the country have shifted toward making math engaging for students at the expense of evidence-based teaching practices. And due to funding shortages or misguided efforts to improve equity, many students are held back from taking the hardest math courses.
> You're hand wavy "it's the pandemic" neglects the other evidence provided
There was no significant other evidence. And "hand wavy" is missing the point. There is a bleedingly obvious hypothesis for this effect with huge signal in all sorts of other areas of social policy. I mean, really? The pandemic is visible in every measurable segment of society but somehow not a major factor in education results?
In some sense, yes, Occam's Razor is a principle that embraces "hand wavy" understanding by demanding extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims. And I think it's going to work very well here. Again, for the third time: write it down. In four years this will all bounce back.
What's happening here is actually a different logical fallacy entirely. HN commenters have a distinct ideological bent against new ("woke") ideas in education. And they're willing to ignore things like giant global pandemics to chase their preferred explanations.
Our response to Covid was just the accelerant. We're lucky, in a way, as we can see the outcomes of many current policies a lot quicker.
cant do mathematic? shouldnt it be mathematics? ie "...students cant do maths anymore?"
Both are fine. The singular form "math" is predominant in the States. But, notably, not "mathematic"
so is the saying "could care less", but both are wrong and indicative of some kind of low level neurological deficit, possibly lead contamination or something similar
Maths is the singular form in English speaking countries.
Not in the US.
As a brit, yawn.