Submitted by Hardscrabble Farmer
Check out that graph. Damn, that’s a fine one.
Anyone see what I see?
While everyone is focusing on the difference between each racial group in its overall achievement (if you can call it that) no one asks the really important question; in 30 years the overall average of all students is still less than 50% of fully grasping the math. How much has the cost of schooling increased in that time? How many more teachers and tech and new schools and paraprofessionals and tutors and Internet access have they had access to in order to stay exactly where they were when the graph began?
Maybe that’s because they aren’t really hunting bears, so to speak.
California’s Attempt To Hobble Gifted Students Over ‘Racial Disparities’ Starting To Backfire
California’s attempts to eliminate accelerated math courses for gifted students was a terrible idea from the beginning. Now it’s beginning to backfire.
Premised on the absurd notion that naturally gifted asian and white students simply have better opportunities than black and brown students – as opposed to differences in study habits, parental involvement, and cultural values – a draft plan to overhaul how math is taught across the state has set off a fierce debate, according to the NY Times.
The draft proposal rejects the notion that some students are naturally gifted, and recommends against shifting certain students into gifted programs in middle school. It also proposes that math should not be ‘colorblind’ – and that teachers should use math lessons to explore social justice, “for example, by looking out for gender stereotypes in word problems, or applying math concepts to topics like immigration or inequality.”
What?
Enter the backlash…
Critics – including hundreds of Californians working in STEM fields who signed an open letter opposing the plan – say it would punish high achieving students by limiting options gifted programs. According to the letter, the draft constitutes “an endless river of new pedagogical fads that effectively distort and displace actual math.”
Even in heavily Democratic California — a state with six million public school students and an outsize influence on textbook publishing nationwide — the draft guidelines encountered scathing criticism, with charges that the framework would inject “woke” politics into a subject that is supposed to be practical and precise.
The battle over math pedagogy is a tale as old as multiplication tables. An idea called “new math,” pitched as a more conceptual approach to the subject, had its heyday in the 1960s. About a decade ago, amid debates over the national Common Core standards, many parents bemoaned math exercises that they said seemed to dump line-by-line computation in favor of veritable hieroglyphs. -NYT
“Math is math. Two plus two equals four,” said Williamson M. Evers, a senior fellow at the Independent Institute and a former official with the Education Department during the administration of George W. Bush.
Will the adults in the room prevail?
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What a shame that the graph doesn’t go back to the 1920s and track these kinds of results throughout the period of serious racism, segregation, Jim Crow, etc. and through the implementation of the “Great” Society programs and massive increases in waste on government monopoly schools. I know that folks like Thomas Sowell and others have done the investigating, and while not an apples to apples comparison, it would show that blacks were FAR BETTER OFF academically when there were two-parent households, when the majority of “hispanics” were in this country LEGALLY, and when government was stealing far less to promote their agenda via the day-prison system.
Indeed, the massive increase in spending has yielded virtually no increase in performance, and the groups are in the same ranking as before. Folks whose response is other than “its because we aren’t spending enough” would look deeper at root causes. But of course the only root cause that matters is because whites are all racists, and blacks and hispanics can’t manage unless they are given special treatment. But don’t worry, holding that opinion somehow isn’t racist one bit. LOL
Its going to be a cold, harsh winter.
Average intelligence in the US has been declining for 100 years, and now there is increasingly no place for bright students who can’t afford private schools, who are swamped with applications as it is…
Good point. I’d like to see the grades and difficulty from that period. Before Johnson.
Before the 1940s or so, most were fully educated by 2nd grade. My wife’s grandfather completed only second grade, could write cursive, ran his own house building and house moving business, a farm, and raised two kids. Having an “education” doesn’t necessarily mean that you know shit.
Will the adults in the room prevail? Hope so, but wouldn’t bet on it..A few years back, one of the best high schools in Illinois, under the pressure of black and latino school board members, cancelled its college level track, leaving bright students no advanced classes they could take without disruptive, low IQ students in them…
I live in the Bay Area. My son graduated HS in 2002 and got a full ride to Dartmouth for his math skills. He graduated Summa in 2006. It pisses me off greatly that some kid today with equal or greater skills may be denied advanced placement for “equity’s” sake. What a crock.
This is not my post but I saw it yesterday on another blog and wanted to share it.
Maff Question: Leroy is sentenced to 10 years in prison for armed robbery. If Leroy gets 2 years off his sentence for good behacvior and another 2 years off for snitching out his cell mate, how many years will Leroy spend in prison? If you said 6 years you are incorrect. Leroy was shanked to death in the shower in his 3rd year of lock up. So the correct answer be 3 years.
Silly farmer, maff is people that need future employment. 2+2 + $450,000 if you’re an illegal invader.
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More math for you:
Cutting our losses is the best choice.
99% of that money went to corrupt leaders of the ruling tribe. Not really that much different in the US.
You can see the decline of our educational system really pick up steam about the same time the Dept of Education was created in the mid 80’s.
Jimmy Carter created the Dept. of Ed and Raygun Ronnie promised to abolish it… Didn’t happen . Raygun was a compromised lying POS too.
They were created in 1980, but they didn’t really get rolling with screwing things up until the mid-80’s. 🙂
Wrong again. The Department of Education was created when Jimmy Carter signed the bill into law on Oct 17, 1979
Do you even google?
In 1980, Ronald Reagan campaigned for the presidency on a platform that included abolishing the U.S. Department of Education. Only recently created by President Jimmy Carter as a political favor to the teachers’ unions, the department had failed to deliver either better test scores or more rigorous curriculum dedicated to academic excellence.
https://www.ontheissues.org/Celeb/Ronald_Reagan_Education.htm
Really? Well excuse me then. So it was signed into law in the 4th quarter of 1979 but didn’t start operations until 1980. That’s not the point. The point is it’s been ineffective from the beginning. Whether it started being ineffective in October 1979, May 1980, or 1985 is superfluous. It still sucks. 🙂
The point is both Carter and Reagan were puppets.
Not sure where the 50% comes from other than the trend line is 1/2 the scale.
What I do see is regardless of race, all races have essentially flat lined since 2003 – 2006 period.
The fundamental point regardless of multiple programs, insane amounts of money, political party in power, our kids are not improving off base line.
Reminds me of Einstein’s definition of insanity.
A couple of quotes to ponder….
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
-Upton Sinclair
“Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.”
–Frank Zappa
The vertical axis indicates a “scale score” that reads zero to 500. The horizontal axis indicates that all children throughout that period scored on average no more than 250 out of a maximum 500, that would be 50%.
Pandering to the lowest common denominator is always a recipe for failure. There is a rule of economics that dictates that if you subsidize something, you will create more of that.
Programs like this subsidize lowering standards and rewarding failure which will in turn result in the deterioration of our ability to produce as a nation.
I wish I could believe this was being done as a result of stupidity and incompetency, but I fear that something more threatening is likely.
There are no adults in those rooms. Never have been.
2+2 equals 4, yes, but a marshmallow now – which will gladly be repaid next Tuesday – is always (net-net & on balance guaranteed to imbalance) preferred to 1+1 equals 2 marshmallows all for you if you can just hold out for an interminable few minutes.
Marshmallow synonyms soft characters, short time preferences, attention spans, & syntheses…and graft is the graph the non-adult surrounds knows how to read, but more importantly to the point, plot, congenitally. It’s a buggy feature, not a featured bug, & no amount of better living thru chemistry is going to alter it.
Those math whizzers-prodigies that came up with nukes for the adults in the room, for example. Or the surveillance machinery. Or the central bank. Or financial instrument derivatives. Ororororoboros.
Dumbdowning’s dumb. But there ain’t ever been a shortage of genius dummies either. Maths disconnected from character – mathsculinity? – is the equation of carnage.
Plusbesides, skool ain’t ever been about what’s good for the kidsnapped to Stockholm…so, what’s the point of giving a shite about this or that particular pimple on the m/assman? It’s arguing for the brochure deed of trust that no adult trusts, since it’s obviously fraud, a Frankenstein lab created marshmallow.
I *think* I understand what you’re saying. May need to keep dumbing down s’more for us little people. I was public skooled, ya know.
Well, you know about the marshmallow experiments with the little kids, right? Time preference some economists frame it. Impulse control some shrinks frame it. Checkers players some chess players call it. Nervous…systems.
And you know about “getting paid.” And getting “reimbursed.” And about “ROI.” And about the penchant for taking losses that should be cut short (so that profits can be located & let out to run) & “reframing” those into Molly Browns ~ “unsinkable.”
((Some “speculator” quipped “If you have enough money (to just keep rolling positions, meeting margin calls) you don’t ever have to take a loss.” He was saying lies can be bribed & bought in the mirror just as much as in the “out there” that gets most of the emphasis.))
And you know that 9.6 out of 10 mathletes just ain’t this Ed Snowden mathsculine:
So the point is math chops ain’t no point at all if a given matheusela’s just gonna’ take the same long in tooth & red in claw “opportunities” to repay the sunk cost student loans, buy the ROI reimbursement symbols that emperors robe a “meta” northerly ascent.
I used the atomic bombers, among others, to make the point via exaggeration: the best of the best Mcveigh Kaczynski kamikazes doin’ god’s work while also pilin’ up pieces of paper with ‘in god we trust’ printed on them whilst leaving the adults & god to sort out the murdered & the post-coital coerced (la petite mort, only not so petite).
Specialization’s a good point. Ken31. And an even better rationalization. “Don’t blame me, I’m myopic…I just work for, follow orders of, people who got the bigpic 20:20 & so can wield (Bill Hickok) me & whatever I got my pedi/de/gree in, wildly.” Adam Smith’s pin factory’s one thing, bomb “safety pin” mfg “for the adults in the room” is something else – that “pays”- better – entirely.
(How’d Milch describe Hickok? “…a kind of primitive, beautiful athlete who had been used by American society, virtually from his adolescence, as an instrument of order, which…whose organizing principle was not justice, but force. During trhe Civil War he was a scout, & then a spy, & subsequently he was an Indian fighter & a Marshall in certain Kansas communities which essentially were the settings for annual reenactments of the Civil War. The cattle barons would hire Union veterans to be temporary Marshalls to deal with the cowboys. And Hickok was the most prominent of those Marshalls. So that in his essence (Hickok) represented all of the capacities that we kind of associate with the American character: extraordinarily gifted, he was wonderfully polite, he was very kind, he had infinite patience with kids…& he brooked no bullshit. One of the reasons he was so effective a killer was he had no illusions about what the process was, he wasn’t averse to drawing first. And combined with that he had no sense at all of how to take care of himself. He was absolutely the instrument of the intentions of others. When there’s a Civil War to be fought, or Indians, or scouting to be done, a guy like that gets work & does relatively well. And in the absence of those kinds of primacies, he’s lost…he had lived past his utility to the culture, except as a caricature, & he wasn’t good at that.”)
Meet the nuremberg, same as the Oldenburg, & every other iceberg.
Smart people can do, & most certainly do, dumb things.
For one thing/reason, *all* people are born into lies, are underwater with lies from the get. And it takes time bail yer boat. Lots of time. The bigger chunk of a lifetime.
Many kids, maybe even most, by their teens, are very aware of what most “adults” are mostly about, & they still are only perceiving the tip of the iceberg, because they haven’t lived long enough for fuller measures to be taken.
But with passage of time most just stuff perception down, & go along.
I say smart people that do dumb things, & then just keep doing dumb things, aren’t smart at all; they may be well trained, for the circus slot they occupy, but they aren’t smart. Going along to get along is gulag.
Nervous systems…tend to get nervouser. Fear’s loathsome cowardice & smart don’t, can’t, occupy the same foxhole. It’s one, or the other. Lies can be bribed & bought in the mirror…& cowardice is like a central bank, printing lies to bribe & buy lies.
So…does that clarify above…& below? …
…Well, who ain’t an ex-con, done the time, “served” the sentence? I even bought the Brooklyn bridge called college…slow fucking learner-bailer…
…((a confluence of persuasions, frustrations, desperations had me believing I could get the taste of south outta’ my mouth & facilitate true north ascent @unitwobirdsinglestone)…
…If only I coulda’ bought the Bejamin Button life arc, instead. But no, the Kierkegaard clause* prevails. And the yellow ribbon tied round the old oak tree comes at the end, or closer to the end, if it comes at all…
…((how’d L’amour put it, about just getting good at writing at near his own book’s end?))
…Which is who I’m talkin’ ‘bout, the normie surround : the ones, the many, the not proud, the poured into jarheads for whom it never comes, no yellow ribboned oaks, nor soup neither.
*Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
Meal ticket math…nobody in here but us cheep-cheep-cheaper replacement chickens &…death:
The deckchairs, face & number cards, is stacked, the unsinkable titanic’ll always be wracked, & Molly Browns will always rationalize & self-congratulate that they got it hacked. But from the instant king ferdinad the bull & queen Isabella the egg issue forth to colonize the wombs those colonists will be his(&hers) tory instruments, mostly, or not to be’s hardly at all. It’s a rough 80:20 & a mic’d & plastiguaged 96:4. That’s the math that tells the idiot tale of sound & fury signifying soma, & meta, & nothing…. I ain’t misanthropic, either ::: this here’s the bullseye, so that’s hitanthropy.
I understand what you’re saying. Yes, it does clarify. You have a brilliant mind.
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” What a bummer.
So what is intelligence? I have noticed that specialist can really break down a complex problem, but their solutions are insane, because they do not have the breadth of experience to give them wisdom. Or they may just be psychopaths.
Intelligence is an abstract concept. It does not exist in the physical realm. So what does?
“Study habits, parental involvement and cultural values”……everything except IQ! Huh?
Oh, can’t talk about the obvious.
Maybe that’s the real problem?