Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5

California students are struggling in math. Will reforms make the problem worse?

#1
C C Offline
https://www.newyorker.com/science/elemen...blem-worse

EXCERPTS: The California Mathematics Framework (C.M.F.) is an arguably obscure but extremely consequential document informing the educations of millions of children [...] the C.M.F. doesn’t decide what math concepts to teach; that is decided by the common-core standards. Instead, it makes recommendations to public-school teachers about how and when to teach what elements of math.

[...] Among the states, California is considerably below average, and sometimes in the lowest quartile, in a number of national assessments of math proficiency. There is also a pronounced achievement gap, with women, minorities, and the poor falling behind. Given that math is a necessary step toward a STEM career—in demand, high-paying—these numbers are more than simply lamentable. So revisiting our approach to teaching math, in California and beyond, is urgent.

The current draft of the C.M.F., which will be voted on by the California State Board of Education in 2023, is intended to make math education more equitable [...] The C.M.F. [...] suggests that math be “de-tracked”—that kids not be sorted into higher- and lower-level courses in their early schooling, and certainly not before high school, in the theory that slowing down math education can lead to deeper understanding.

[...] fierce and fine-grained criticism of the C.M.F. came—perhaps surprisingly—from people who have done a lot of work promoting diversity and equity in math and other STEM fields. “Everything I’ve read about this proposal is going to make matters worse,” Adrian Mims said, of the initial draft of the C.M.F. Mims is the founder of the Calculus Project, a program that has been remarkably successful at getting more students of color to take and succeed in advanced math courses.

“Modifying curriculum that way will not bring equity,” he said. “It will just bring in a lower track.” The lower track he refers to is the data-science track, which he argued would not prepare students for a possible future career in data science, let alone in engineering, physics, economics, or computer science. “And we all know who ends up in that track—Black, Hispanic, and low-income students.”

Brian Conrad, a professor of mathematics at Stanford, told me that, during the Trump era, he had been avoiding the news, “so I had no idea about this campaign to replace Algebra II with data science.” He then began to follow movements in California's K-12 math curricula more closely.

When he read the nine-hundred-page C.M.F. document, he was concerned. “I encountered a lot of assertions that were hard to believe and were justified via citations to other papers. So I read those other papers,” Conrad wrote on a Web site he started for the purpose of sharing his findings. (He is not on Twitter.) Conrad is a graduate of public schools; his father was a public-school math teacher. “To my astonishment, in essentially all cases, the papers were seriously misrepresented,” he wrote.

[...] School-board leaders ... claimed that diversity had increased in advanced math courses. One presentation slide showed that the number of Black students passing an advanced math class had increased from eleven per cent to forty-two per cent—an extraordinary change. But those percentages referred to a shift from three out of twenty-seven students to five out of twelve students—in the entire San Francisco public-school system. Those numbers, any way you look at them, are awful, and too small to reveal any trend... (MORE - missing details)
Reply
#2
Syne Offline
Can't improve until you ditch common-core.
Reply


Possibly Related Threads…
Thread Author Replies Views Last Post
  Why research fraud is getting worse + Trust in sci & vaccines still declining. Why? C C 0 47 Nov 28, 2023 06:29 PM
Last Post: C C
  Students: another [underlying] facet of why the social sciences can be unreliable? C C 0 199 Sep 13, 2022 04:29 PM
Last Post: C C
  "Woke" school invasion runs into math obstacle from both parents & educators C C 0 67 Mar 30, 2022 05:19 PM
Last Post: C C
  Many US students won’t find accurate climate science in their textbooks C C 1 84 Nov 17, 2021 05:42 PM
Last Post: Syne
  Scientific American (and math) go full woke C C 2 149 Aug 31, 2021 04:19 AM
Last Post: Yazata
  Goop’s Netflix series: "Much worse than expected & can’t be unseen" C C 0 369 Jan 18, 2020 10:07 PM
Last Post: C C



Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)