In my experience, when my kids were in a public school in New York, I argued that it was the middle quintiles that we should worry about: there were Gifted and Talented programs, and there was Special Ed, and those ends got all the attention, but the mainstream kids got football. So I’m in the group that thinks it’s unconscionable to remove math.
With all the discussion about increasing inequality in the country, some social scientists from Stanford found that if you removed three counties, San Mateo and Santa Clara in Silicon Valley and King County in Seattle, there was no increase in inequality in the rest of the country (of course New York City is very unequal but it always was). And if you survey the tech companies in those counties you’ll likely find everybody took algebra. Correlation is not causality, but it’s evocative.
When I was in the Washington DC public schools almost 60 years ago the school disctrict chose to cancel the college prep track - officially to devote the resources to the failing students. The parents of bright poor kids were largely stuck for a while. The middle class parents either sent their kids to private schools or moved out. We moved out. The private schools eventually started offering scholarships to some of the bright poor kids. But the public school system fell apart.
Teachers cannot teach effectively when a large fraction of the students in a class are disaffected and uninterested in learning. The budget almost doesn't count. And this is independent of the issue that some subjects are sequential and build upon earlier mastery.
I would add another reason for accelerating math: A lot of states have Running Start / College in High School programs where the student can attend community college starting in 11th grade and get high school AND college credit for their coursework. If the student is going to go into try and transfer to the state university in a field where they need math, and that includes some business disciplines as well as most STEM areas, the students need to be ready for calculus no later than 11th grade, and doing it in 10th grade would be reasonable. And a good stat course would be helpful - but the best stat courses also require calculus. Doing the Running Start and transfer approach allows students to cut their college costs roughly in half - assuming that they are living at home while they do it. A very worthwhile approach. My son did this - and took 7 quarters to graduate with his BS.
Is it? It seems natural. "Society doesn't really care about poor black kids so they never get the resources they need". OKay, makes sense.
But then someone like Freddie deBoer doesn't seem to agree and quotes studies showing we (well, you, the US) have been spending plenty https://www.nber.org/papers/w19060 and nothing changes very much.
Well, actually, that's not quite true. Modern children appear to be better educated than previous generations. It's just that the gaps/the social promotion agenda part of it fails.
And, to me, an economist, the reason is pretty obvious. We're growing relatively modestly asides of tech (which does require a lot of education to take advantage of). We're not in a catch-up phase or a 1950s type of situation where an entire generation can be lifted to a higher level and thus feel good.
Right now, for various reasons, economic growth is sluggish and the amount of elite spots is stable/limited. Thus competition for these spots is intense. The idea that this is a good set up to achieve social redistribution is ludicrous. Schools will, willingly or not, be made to reproduce the existing social order.
I'm not entirely wild about the "literature and history are easy and it doesn't really matter whether you know the right answers and the smart kids will do it anyway" part of this take--it's edging pretty close to the "we don't really even need that much of that in college, the humanities are just auto-didactical parts of life and they're easy". It kind of points to two different versions of 'enrichment' which call back to sequential and less sequential curricular structures--the one where the goal is to get as far up the sequence as fast and efficiently as possible *in order to* do the work that really important/interesting/advancing knowledge, vs. enrichment as validation and encouragement right here right now with material and skills you're already poised to do, no lengthy sequence required. It might be true that I was going to go off and read challenging things in high school regardless, but there was a big difference between the English AP teacher who gave everybody an A at the start of the semester and told the students who didn't care about the literature to go sit in the back of the room and talk quietly amongst themselves and invited the rest of us to come up to the front and sit with him to discuss Invisible Man and the junior-year English lit course where the prevailing mood from the teacher on down was "let's all be bored together talking about these books".
I think even for math/science, it's not just about building a stronger foundation more rapidly in order to accelerate the arrival at the most interesting stage of STEM knowledge, it's about making students excited about what they're learning and feeling that they have company in that excitement. I think it's *possible* to do that without separating the accelerated from the rest, but plainly most schools don't have the knack to do it generally.
I was trying to be a little careful there, but clearly not quite enough. I think it's unquestionably true that having an active and engaging teacher in English has significant benefits-- if nothing else, having my AP English teacher (I was the only student in the class) curate the list of works to study got me to read a bunch of stuff I would not have chosen if left to my own devices.
But at the same time, I think that had I not had that class, I would not have been at a very significant disadvantage going into college-level English classes, because I read a lot of stuff on my own. The same would not have been true of going into college physics without some prior exposure to calculus, because then as now it was more or less expected that students intending to study science in college would reach a certain level of math beyond the bare minimum requirements for graduation, and the options for moving beyond that outside of school were not great.
You can to some extent accommodate students who would benefit from higher math without excessive extra resources by simply having them skip a grade, and creating one AP course for seniors. That was what they did in my high school, and while it wasn't ideal, it mostly worked. It would be better to have a more specialized program that moves through basic material at a faster pace with some thought given to how things are sequenced to make it more efficient, but there's enough repetition in the standard classes that you can mostly pick it up. It would not be sufficient, though, to simply cover the same set of topics as the regular curriculum in a more engaging/exciting manner and expect students to enter college-level work on par with others in their cohort who got farther along in the sequence of topics. There are certain things that we expect students to have seen before they get to our courses, and those who haven't seen them will be at a disadvantage.
There's maybe a case to be made for scaling back expectations for how far along a prescribed sequence of topics students are expected to get, in exchange for them having a deeper mastery of those topics. As I said in the post, I'd be open to that, as I see a lot of students struggling in ways that suggest they were rushed through background material without fully understanding it. But that's a curricular choice with significant downstream costs-- SOMEBODY has to teach those topics at some point-- and those need to be taken into account when considering a change, and dealt with in a coordinated way.
I keep thinking a bit about the small but interesting subset of things that we don't expect anybody to have studied before or even during an undergraduate education and yet we expect somehow that people who do expert work eventually will acquire expert knowledge of before or right at the start of graduate study. Nobody expects an American undergraduate to have learned isiZulu or Kazakh by the time they start graduate work in anthropology or history but many doctoral programs would expect a student to become fairly fluent in such a language by the time they begin fieldwork or archival work, for example.
STEM fields have many examples of this as well. I am thinking right now of something my colleagues said they learned about intro chem classes in many universities and colleges--that they try to cram in *everything* that you might focus on in a four-year program in chemistry, a kind of "chemistry's greatest hits" approach, in order to prepare students for climbing all the ladders they might need to climb, and yet the reality is that a lot of chemists in doctoral programs are going to have to go back and really work up a ladder that they only barely got started on because they ended up focusing elsewhere and it turns out that the later work they're doing is quite different.
So I wonder a bit if we couldn't all design a kind of metastudy of the claims we make collectively about "things you will have to know" and then compare that to when it is that people *actually* operationalize or call upon those things, and see if we're as right about what is necessary and right about *when* it is necessary as we think we are. A kind of "abstract ideal clock" of learning, as it were--because the problem is partly about what we *expect*, as you indicate. If we didn't *expect* a generation of students to arrive with calculus, well, we'd have to teach calculus when they arrived, right? Needs must if the devil drives. The question is what we'd be losing *at the other end* as a terminal point of undergraduate learning, and if it turns out that by that point, a lot of students are already beginning to split off and specialize and make autonomous decisions about what they'll need to learn next, what would we lose by pushing more of that part of their education into graduate study or into a professional career? What if a scientist spent their late 20s and early 30s learning what many have learned prior in their early 20s?
Well-reasoned and articulately argued. I would add a few points which will expand your argument: (1) the real problem is social promotion. That starts in elementary school in large urban school districts. (2). Math is not well taught in America. Most First World countries teach math and set math expectations quite differently. (3). Most American public school teachers are not well trained. Most keep their jobs by demonstrating that they can control a class, not teach well. It is almost impossible to catch up socially promoted children in subjects that require reasoning. (4). This educational issue cannot be solved by national testing regimes. For a number of reasons far too complex to discuss here, teachers, teachers' unions, school districts and state education departments are reactionary and resistant when real change is needed or required. Almost all actual educational innovations are resisted, improperly taught and die on the vine. (5). Despite claiming to care about children and their education, education departments across America are really compliance departments with cultures devoid of educational innovation. The culture of compliance is driven by two factors: reporting requirements for federal and state funding; and former teachers who do not want to be in an urban classroom and are compliance experts because that is an easy and safe job,.
In my experience, when my kids were in a public school in New York, I argued that it was the middle quintiles that we should worry about: there were Gifted and Talented programs, and there was Special Ed, and those ends got all the attention, but the mainstream kids got football. So I’m in the group that thinks it’s unconscionable to remove math.
With all the discussion about increasing inequality in the country, some social scientists from Stanford found that if you removed three counties, San Mateo and Santa Clara in Silicon Valley and King County in Seattle, there was no increase in inequality in the rest of the country (of course New York City is very unequal but it always was). And if you survey the tech companies in those counties you’ll likely find everybody took algebra. Correlation is not causality, but it’s evocative.
Check out Kevin Drums posts on covid school closures. Interesting.
When I was in the Washington DC public schools almost 60 years ago the school disctrict chose to cancel the college prep track - officially to devote the resources to the failing students. The parents of bright poor kids were largely stuck for a while. The middle class parents either sent their kids to private schools or moved out. We moved out. The private schools eventually started offering scholarships to some of the bright poor kids. But the public school system fell apart.
Teachers cannot teach effectively when a large fraction of the students in a class are disaffected and uninterested in learning. The budget almost doesn't count. And this is independent of the issue that some subjects are sequential and build upon earlier mastery.
I would add another reason for accelerating math: A lot of states have Running Start / College in High School programs where the student can attend community college starting in 11th grade and get high school AND college credit for their coursework. If the student is going to go into try and transfer to the state university in a field where they need math, and that includes some business disciplines as well as most STEM areas, the students need to be ready for calculus no later than 11th grade, and doing it in 10th grade would be reasonable. And a good stat course would be helpful - but the best stat courses also require calculus. Doing the Running Start and transfer approach allows students to cut their college costs roughly in half - assuming that they are living at home while they do it. A very worthwhile approach. My son did this - and took 7 quarters to graduate with his BS.
But that “additional resources” is a killer…
Is it? It seems natural. "Society doesn't really care about poor black kids so they never get the resources they need". OKay, makes sense.
But then someone like Freddie deBoer doesn't seem to agree and quotes studies showing we (well, you, the US) have been spending plenty https://www.nber.org/papers/w19060 and nothing changes very much.
Well, actually, that's not quite true. Modern children appear to be better educated than previous generations. It's just that the gaps/the social promotion agenda part of it fails.
And, to me, an economist, the reason is pretty obvious. We're growing relatively modestly asides of tech (which does require a lot of education to take advantage of). We're not in a catch-up phase or a 1950s type of situation where an entire generation can be lifted to a higher level and thus feel good.
Right now, for various reasons, economic growth is sluggish and the amount of elite spots is stable/limited. Thus competition for these spots is intense. The idea that this is a good set up to achieve social redistribution is ludicrous. Schools will, willingly or not, be made to reproduce the existing social order.
I'm not entirely wild about the "literature and history are easy and it doesn't really matter whether you know the right answers and the smart kids will do it anyway" part of this take--it's edging pretty close to the "we don't really even need that much of that in college, the humanities are just auto-didactical parts of life and they're easy". It kind of points to two different versions of 'enrichment' which call back to sequential and less sequential curricular structures--the one where the goal is to get as far up the sequence as fast and efficiently as possible *in order to* do the work that really important/interesting/advancing knowledge, vs. enrichment as validation and encouragement right here right now with material and skills you're already poised to do, no lengthy sequence required. It might be true that I was going to go off and read challenging things in high school regardless, but there was a big difference between the English AP teacher who gave everybody an A at the start of the semester and told the students who didn't care about the literature to go sit in the back of the room and talk quietly amongst themselves and invited the rest of us to come up to the front and sit with him to discuss Invisible Man and the junior-year English lit course where the prevailing mood from the teacher on down was "let's all be bored together talking about these books".
I think even for math/science, it's not just about building a stronger foundation more rapidly in order to accelerate the arrival at the most interesting stage of STEM knowledge, it's about making students excited about what they're learning and feeling that they have company in that excitement. I think it's *possible* to do that without separating the accelerated from the rest, but plainly most schools don't have the knack to do it generally.
I was trying to be a little careful there, but clearly not quite enough. I think it's unquestionably true that having an active and engaging teacher in English has significant benefits-- if nothing else, having my AP English teacher (I was the only student in the class) curate the list of works to study got me to read a bunch of stuff I would not have chosen if left to my own devices.
But at the same time, I think that had I not had that class, I would not have been at a very significant disadvantage going into college-level English classes, because I read a lot of stuff on my own. The same would not have been true of going into college physics without some prior exposure to calculus, because then as now it was more or less expected that students intending to study science in college would reach a certain level of math beyond the bare minimum requirements for graduation, and the options for moving beyond that outside of school were not great.
You can to some extent accommodate students who would benefit from higher math without excessive extra resources by simply having them skip a grade, and creating one AP course for seniors. That was what they did in my high school, and while it wasn't ideal, it mostly worked. It would be better to have a more specialized program that moves through basic material at a faster pace with some thought given to how things are sequenced to make it more efficient, but there's enough repetition in the standard classes that you can mostly pick it up. It would not be sufficient, though, to simply cover the same set of topics as the regular curriculum in a more engaging/exciting manner and expect students to enter college-level work on par with others in their cohort who got farther along in the sequence of topics. There are certain things that we expect students to have seen before they get to our courses, and those who haven't seen them will be at a disadvantage.
There's maybe a case to be made for scaling back expectations for how far along a prescribed sequence of topics students are expected to get, in exchange for them having a deeper mastery of those topics. As I said in the post, I'd be open to that, as I see a lot of students struggling in ways that suggest they were rushed through background material without fully understanding it. But that's a curricular choice with significant downstream costs-- SOMEBODY has to teach those topics at some point-- and those need to be taken into account when considering a change, and dealt with in a coordinated way.
I keep thinking a bit about the small but interesting subset of things that we don't expect anybody to have studied before or even during an undergraduate education and yet we expect somehow that people who do expert work eventually will acquire expert knowledge of before or right at the start of graduate study. Nobody expects an American undergraduate to have learned isiZulu or Kazakh by the time they start graduate work in anthropology or history but many doctoral programs would expect a student to become fairly fluent in such a language by the time they begin fieldwork or archival work, for example.
STEM fields have many examples of this as well. I am thinking right now of something my colleagues said they learned about intro chem classes in many universities and colleges--that they try to cram in *everything* that you might focus on in a four-year program in chemistry, a kind of "chemistry's greatest hits" approach, in order to prepare students for climbing all the ladders they might need to climb, and yet the reality is that a lot of chemists in doctoral programs are going to have to go back and really work up a ladder that they only barely got started on because they ended up focusing elsewhere and it turns out that the later work they're doing is quite different.
So I wonder a bit if we couldn't all design a kind of metastudy of the claims we make collectively about "things you will have to know" and then compare that to when it is that people *actually* operationalize or call upon those things, and see if we're as right about what is necessary and right about *when* it is necessary as we think we are. A kind of "abstract ideal clock" of learning, as it were--because the problem is partly about what we *expect*, as you indicate. If we didn't *expect* a generation of students to arrive with calculus, well, we'd have to teach calculus when they arrived, right? Needs must if the devil drives. The question is what we'd be losing *at the other end* as a terminal point of undergraduate learning, and if it turns out that by that point, a lot of students are already beginning to split off and specialize and make autonomous decisions about what they'll need to learn next, what would we lose by pushing more of that part of their education into graduate study or into a professional career? What if a scientist spent their late 20s and early 30s learning what many have learned prior in their early 20s?
Well-reasoned and articulately argued. I would add a few points which will expand your argument: (1) the real problem is social promotion. That starts in elementary school in large urban school districts. (2). Math is not well taught in America. Most First World countries teach math and set math expectations quite differently. (3). Most American public school teachers are not well trained. Most keep their jobs by demonstrating that they can control a class, not teach well. It is almost impossible to catch up socially promoted children in subjects that require reasoning. (4). This educational issue cannot be solved by national testing regimes. For a number of reasons far too complex to discuss here, teachers, teachers' unions, school districts and state education departments are reactionary and resistant when real change is needed or required. Almost all actual educational innovations are resisted, improperly taught and die on the vine. (5). Despite claiming to care about children and their education, education departments across America are really compliance departments with cultures devoid of educational innovation. The culture of compliance is driven by two factors: reporting requirements for federal and state funding; and former teachers who do not want to be in an urban classroom and are compliance experts because that is an easy and safe job,.