I teach math at a community college. It is all about removing complexity. The idea in education is that everyone is intellectually equal. Therefore the racial achievement gap in mathematics is due to racism. The solution is to change things. Too many POC students aren’t placing into college level math therefore get rid of placement test and get rid of remedial courses. Create new college algebra with just in time tutoring and voila, no more racial achievement gap. If you dumb things down enough everyone passes and we can pat ourselves on the back and claim to have solved the racial achievement gap.
My complaint about these reforms is that the root cause of the issue is not being addressed. This has long term negative effects. My own anecdotal experience is that what used to be a C is now an A or a B in my classes and I’m passing people who don’t know anything. I’m judged by the passing rate so I’m maximizing that metric. These reforms are just doing what I’m doing but in a less forthright way.
> My complaint about these reforms is that the root cause of the issue is not being addressed.
The root cause is well outside of the scope of schools to address. Perhaps they can help to a small extent through things like lunchtime meals. But curriculum reform itself will never narrow the gap more than a tiny amount.
Childhood nutrition, single parent households, health of mother during pregnancy, culture/respect towards education as a virtue in the community and household, education level of parents and the time they have to play and talk with their kids.
All these things are going to impact the capabilities of young school children and feed into outcome gaps between various groups (Black vs White, poor vs rich).
I believe most proponents of "math equity" actually know all this, and are just maliciously virtue signalling either because they're jealous that their own kids aren't doing well, or for social credit.
> Childhood nutrition, single parent households, health of mother during pregnancy, culture/respect towards education as a virtue in the community and household, education level of parents and the time they have to play and talk with their kids.
I'm not American, and I don't claim to know the environment and the issues people face there, or their root causes. I may not be fully understanding the extent of nutritional differences or family dynamics.
I am, however, absolutely certain that affluence feeds affluence and that misfortune feeds misfortune, on average. Even if you had all of the above equal except for the education levels and socio-economic status of the children's parents, you'd end up with statistically different outcomes.
I live in a fairly egalitarian country, and if I remember correctly, there's an average income gap of ~30 percent or so between people whose parents were in the highest quartile in income and those who were in the lowest quartile. While ethnicity may play some role in the statistical gap nowadays, I don't think it explains the statistical difference; ethnic minorities are disadvantaged here but they make up a small enough minority that I expect the bulk of the difference to be simply due to socio-economic differences within the same ethnic group.
Basically, if your parents and their social in-group got highly educated, I believe you perceive that as the norm. If they didn't, it's not as likely that you do.
Add in some practical stuff such as whether your parents can afford to finance or support your education, and the gap's already there. The rest just amplifies it.
Sure, physical health, nutrition etc. can have an effect, and they certainly do if the differences are great enough. I'm sure ethnicity or race has an effect, sometimes due to racism, and sometimes because people perceive their own opportunities or expectations differently depending on social roles, and for various other sociological dynamics. The latter is true even if you remove ethnicity or race from the equation. Racial stereotypes and images probably emphasize things but I don't think you can pin it all on that.
Considering how much worse off African Americans are socio-economically, on average, than white Americans, it's a no-brainer that their kids end up worse off on average as well. I'm not saying you should just shrug and accept that, and I'm sure actual racism exists as well, but the point is that some of it would happen even without racism, either overt or covert, or any "structural racism" that could include a whole spectrum of things.
That means any real solution is going to be hard and slow, unfortunately. Changing the subject matter in the name of equity really doesn't sound like one.
> I believe most proponents of "math equity" actually know all this, and are just maliciously virtue signalling either because they're jealous that their own kids aren't doing well, or for social credit.
It could also be that people take an easy non-solution in preference to working towards improvements and solutions that could take time, great patience, tolerance of morally and socially undesirable situations (one might have to accept that you can't achieve perfect equity, or at least not quickly, and be able to withstand social judgement for that), and are all around a lot harder to accomplish.
The poverty achievement gap is close to twice that of the racial achievement gap.
I don’t understand why we are so arrogant about everything that we don’t even try to teach 5th graders how to use spreadsheets and generate graphs. So much of math education is useless punishment.
> "to teach 5th graders how to use spreadsheets and generate graphs"
Given that we know how the sausage is made, pretty much the last thing on earth we as software professionals should want is to inculculate the public with an overreliance and blind trust of software.
>Considering how much worse off African Americans are socio-economically, on average, than white Americans, it's a no-brainer that their kids end up worse off on average as well.
It's worse than that. There's something about the American system which forces black families to be not just stagnant economically, but often to move backwards (at least in the transition from Boomer/Gen X to later generations). Both of my grandfathers provided a strikingly middle class life for their families, leaving the military after WWII for decent careers: one as a stable, unionized factory employee, the other as a nuclear physicist. All of their children went to college. Both of my parents hold advanced degrees. Even still, they face financial difficulties that their white peers don't seem to, and my generation of siblings and cousins, while along a spectrum of affluence, seems to have inherited a magnified version of their parents' diminished prospects relative to their achievement. On average, the families that were middle class mid-century are now working class, even with degrees.
And we're outliers, in terms of educational attainment in the black community heretofore. That's changing, but to what ends, when black professionals must have a more advanced degree to be considered for the same job as a white applicant with a less advanced degree? When our houses are worth $50k less, our access to credit is restricted, our tax burden relative to income tends to be higher, and we are actively sought out for discrimination by many bedrock institutions of American life? It's not a level playing field.
Interesting that you don't include genetics in your list, maybe it is a waste of time to try changing all those other things and instead we should focus on directing kids to aspire for their natural talents rather than trying to push them into something that doesn't suit them. To do this we will need to change the economy in a way that the market compensate other talents, not only the ones decided by the US coastal elites. We can do it by blocking illegal immigration and banning imports from countries that don't play by the same rules as western countries. Bringing back the power to the working class.
And the irony of course is that these anti-racism policies that are based on the assumption that minority students aren’t smart enough to pass the tests and therefore the tests need to dumbed down to achieve social justice, are fundamentally racist.
Well, that's not quite what they're saying - essentially what they're saying is that they're a different kind of smart. Not that I agree with the logic, but essentially what they're saying is that the tests - along with the whole curriculum - were designed and written by white people, so they're unintentionally biased in a way that non-white people (except, I guess, asians) can't understand them. The implication being, of course, that if black people had designed the entire curriculum and the tests, they would be similarly impenetrable to white people. Of course, I don't think that makes much sense either, but that is the essence of what they're trying to assert.
Mathematics is arguably (besides perhaps logic) one of the most pure, unbiased sciences one could imagine. Unless perhaps you take issue with the fact that notation borrows a lot of Greek symbols. It’s a difficult subject that requires struggle. Hand holding and dumbing it down is literally the worst thing you could do to make people better at mathematics. You must struggle or you will fail. Don’t think so? Let’s talk again when you hit real analysis.
> Mathematics is arguably (besides perhaps logic) one of the most pure, unbiased sciences one could imagine.
But teaching math absolutely is not. It is a very human process, helping students find handholds in what they know to make the next conceptual step. Absolutely breaking their minds with a new topic, then returning to it a month later and they find it obvious now. There are no platonic math lesson plans out there to tap into, and finding more effective ones has been one of humanity's jobs for at least as long as there has been written language.
(FWIW, real analysis is generally considered one of the easier courses in a typical math degree)
Real analysis courses vary a lot between schools. On YouTube I’ve seen 3rd year real analysis exam questions that were covered in my first year calculus course. All math students at my school had to deal with them.
On the other hand, in my real analysis course we worked with metric spaces, topological spaces, Hilbert spaces, the Baire Category Theorem, etc. I doubt most students in “a typical math degree” would be studying these topics outside of a pure mathematics specific degree program.
> (FWIW, real analysis is generally considered one of the easier courses in a typical math degree)
Quite a few colleges seem to use it as a filter class to determine who has the requisite aptitude and interest in pure math. At my college, the material wasn't particularly bad, but the evaluations were designed to be pretty challenging and grades weren't curved at all.
This is partly because the first course in real analysis (and usually the first upper division linear algebra course) is the first proof oriented course most students face. The material isn't necessarily the hardest, but the proof stuff is new to many people.
Chongli's experience is much more similar to mine, we covered basic real analysis topics in calculus classes, and the class titled real analysis was a third-year pure math course. It was designed for students who had taken multiple proof oriented classes already and were pursuing a pure math major. It's just one of those things that varies between colleges I guess.
you are correct, this is what they are saying. But i have yet to see anyone trying to give evidence that the test or curriculum contain thing that are inherently harder for black student to understand
I'm still waiting for the silence during which the insanity of this ideology finally clicks for those going along. We don't have to politely pretend that it isn't insane. We should pose direct questions to the lumpen commmissars trying to drag everyone into hell along with them.
What is a "white person"? A "black person"? Are these metaphysical categories? Biological categories? Cultural categories? Why would a person of one category be unable to understand curricula produced by people of another?
>The idea in education is that everyone is intellectually equal. Therefore the racial achievement gap in mathematics is due to racism. The solution is to change things.
If we're going to go there: I went from being a straight-A math student in Pre-Calculus to a C (verging on D) student in my AP Calculus course in high school. In college, I retook Calculus and aced it, receiving one of the highest final scores in the class. The first course was taught by a black woman. The second was taught by a white man. The last was taught by a black man. I am a black man.
People in this conversation are frequently quick to dismiss the value of anti-racist (and, for that matter, anti-sexist) policy and execution in STEM pedagogy. They lean on and extrapolate erroneously from the notion of many great mathematical thinkers' probable hereditary advantages to a general, in-born hierarchy of fitness for STEM thinking. Coincidentally, this shields them from tough conversations regarding their own fitness to teach, and especially to teach children whose backgrounds they cannot or will not find sympathy and empathy for. I will admit that the solution is not so simple as my anecdote might suggest, but the implied path shares character with the correct one, in recognizing the farcical nature of assuming that the status quo - especially in this country - is a product of actual potential playing out as it must necessarily so, and not of history overshadowing even the best of intentions (though they are usually less than that).
Definitely agree. There’s no reason for me to believe that I’m good at teaching. My students’ failings could be mostly a reflection of my own failing in teaching.
I don’t dismiss the value of anti-racist policy and attempts to rid myself of negative biases that affect my students. My compliant is when I’m told, and I have been told this by an educator, that the act of requiring knowledge of algebra is itself racist. That’s when I feel we’ve gone too far. I don’t necessarily think algebra should be required but the reasoning for getting rid of that requirement shouldn’t be because black students are not passing it at a high enough rate.
My belief is that far too many people are going to college. The degree therefore is being watered down. If we lived in a country where everyone had guaranteed access to food, shelter, and medical care then the emphasis on college wouldn’t be so pronounced and colleges could then concentrate on what’s needed.
I don’t believe your comment should have been downvoted. Thank you for sharing your experience and thoughts.
I disagree that "too many" people are going to college. That's a canard which defends the artificial exclusivity of education. The vast majority of people are capable of learning algebra, and geometry, and calculus, and in a timely manner, when empowered by conscientious and effective instruction. It is also true that many students - particularly black and Latino students - are place in the contradictory situation of urgently needing a credential that they were not trained correctly to earn. This has nothing to do with their capability, and everything to do with the dysfunctional system that their intellectual growth is beholden to.
So while I appreciate the sympathetic elements of your reply, I have to point out that the root of your argument is a baseless suspicion of the cognitive capabilities of students of color. Yes, requiring knowledge that has been systematically denied, effectively on the basis of race, in order to obtain a credential that is necessary to earn a dignified living, is a form of racism. And we will need to "change things" to fix that.
I made no assumptions, statements, or implications regarding the cognitive capabilities of students of color. You are incorrectly ascribing beliefs to me. I do believe too many people are going to college. I said people and not students of color.
Do you have any evidence that the vast majority of people can learn calculus in a timely manner? I have a lot of anecdotal evidence that this is simply not true. Please note that I’m making no reference to or claims about students of color. I’m speaking about all people. In my experience a lot of people simply can’t learn calculus to any reasonable definition of what that notion entails.
The requirement of a specific set of knowledge for a degree is not what is wrong. What is wrong is living in a society in which having a degree is increasingly necessary to live at a decent standard.
>The idea in education is that everyone is intellectually equal. Therefore the racial achievement gap in mathematics is due to racism. The solution is to change things.
I'm at a loss as to how you might construe these statements, which you presented as wrongheaded (i.e., that you believe the inverse of each), to not imply that you believe that the "cognitive capabilities of students of color" are lesser, considering the nature of the racial achievement gap (an aspect of the conversation which you broached). Either you simply do not remember what you stated earlier, or you're lying. This is clearly a reference to students of color, at the very least. I just want to establish the high probability that you are being disingenuous.
>Do you have any evidence that the vast majority of people can learn calculus in a timely manner?
Assuming that most people can learn at a 5th grade level, and that, as suggested several times in the comments, this lecture could be broken up into multiple days worth of dynamic, interactive instruction, rather than being presented as a blitzkrieg 20-minute lecture:
This is not conclusive, of course. But you asked for any evidence, and I think a reasonable person arguing in good faith would conclude that it suffices. You've shown evidence to be otherwise, so I don't expect you to agree, but I would be happy to be wrong for once in this conversation, on this matter.
The idea in education is that everyone is intellectually equal. Therefore the racial achievement gap in mathematics is due to racism. The solution is to change things.
This is a line of reasoning used by people to advocate for things like getting rid of remedial math. The problem with this line of reasoning to me is the premise that everyone is intellectually equal. Not all premises have to be wrong for an argument to be wrong. This comports with my later statement that too many people are going to college.
There is nothing of a racial nature in any of the statements I made in this regard. To reiterate, I believe that there is meaningful variation in the intellectual ability of humans. I believe too many people are going to college.
My problem with the California initiative is that it is based on the idea that everyone has the same intellectual ability and, furthermore, it does not meaningfully address the true cause of the problem of the racial achievement gap. It’s worthy to address biases amongst institutions and I agree with their efforts in this regard.
The racial achievement gap is a systemic wide problem caused by the structure of our society and nothing meaningful will improve until these things are addressed at a higher level. The effect of the California reforms, I fear, will cause more harm than good.
I understood what you said. This post is simply a reiteration of statements I've already addressed. If you did not mean to make racially-charged statements, you should reassess how you talk about your views in the future, because - and I am telling you this as someone who is taking your stated aim on your word, against my better judgment - what you said sounds racist. Full stop.
The problem is that our societies have made college a status symbol - everybody is supposed to strive for a degree even if what they're planning to do doesn't require it. This is particularly pronounced for white collar jobs, even though many of them are really more akin to tradecraft, and should be properly taught in trade school.
(I would argue that the majority of what we call "software engineering" is actually of this nature.)
And jumping past your comments about anti-racist and anti-sexist policy and execution in STEM pedagogy, your anecdotes point out an actually effective intervention -- supporting the development of a teaching workforce that reflects the communities of students in the classroom! There is a significant difference in approach when someone sees their students as "theirs", a resource to be developed and nurtured, instead of "someone else's", an unruly crowd to be disciplined, as you mention in a later comment. Is the teacher teaching, or babysitting/policing? Too much of US education is the second, for children of any color.
Must you have the same skin color to teach rather than babysit/police? No. In the American context, though, it takes effort rather than inertia to accurately see and develop the potential of your black students -- because inertia gives white teachers in particular a relentlessly negative media stream about "thugs" instead of "future Nobel winner". Our segregated society gives white teachers an incorrect set of Bayesian priors on the meaning of acting out or difficulties in class. They don't have black friends whose kids are going through a rough patch but are still the same sweet kid they were at age six. I mean, I just talked with a high school teacher in a rural Midwestern district who said 'at least she didn't have to worry about kids doing cocaine in the closet at school like at an inner city school', and as a graduate of such an inner city school, my response was "honey we couldn't afford cocaine, that's a rich kid drug". This is a lovely lady, dedicated teacher, and that's her prior on "inner city kids" as of Dec 3, 2021.
It was not the fact that they were black. It was the fact that, as a black student, I was not subject to the same warped expectations that I found common while taking higher-level courses under some of my white teachers. Not every white teacher was like this; however, I did notice, particularly in my AP courses, that many were less supportive and understanding of black students who hit periods of difficulty, and more disciplinarian in their regard. I'm unconvinced that American pedagogy in general has shaken off the inclination to view students of color as un-growing children to be trained and tamed, rather than growing thinkers to be taught and empowered.
This contributed to my later success, but it generally would not - and, to my recollection, doesn't - explain the massive jump in grade. The main difference was a more conscientious teacher and an environment that facilitated better study habits. The second time, unlike the first, I was not forced to fight my teacher's low expectations and lack of support in addition to learning the material.
I'm just trying to find a way to say how much it sucks that your comment is being downvoted.
Fuck it. It sucks so much that your comment is downvoted. Fuck that. This place is fucked up sometimes, where people downvote comments that might at a very long stretch be misconstrued as displaying some remote racial insensitivity if you squint really, reaaaaly hard, and then downvote a black guy who says what he's seen first-hand. It's like watching the BBC giving equal screen time to climate scientists and climate denials in service to some objectivity, long ago lost.
>My complaint about these reforms is that the root cause of the issue is not being addressed.
It becomes a question of how do we ensure every child has access to a dedicated adult willing to tutor them and push them in education matters. Once a child begins to fail in a class, unless someone is there who can help them back onto the route of succeeding, they risk developing learned helplessness around education. Maybe a single subject, maybe education in general. It takes a lot of time for someone to work with a kid, find out what the root cause of the problem is, help them overcome that, and then build up on the topics they have fallen behind on. It helps greatly when that person isn't just there for teaching/tutoring but also invested in the child in other ways so the child values their input.
When parents either don't have time, ability, or desire to do this, there is rarely a backup. Teachers try to fill the gap but they are spread too thin over too many students and rarely are with a student long enough to make a significant impact. Some teachers may even avoid it because it can quickly become an issue of favoring certain students over others. As for parents, while some parents will be able to fix the problem by having more time available, some parents lack enough education to keep helping their child past a certain point. Both finding how to give parents more time and how to educate parents enough to help their children are hard problems. As for the parents who don't have a desire to help, there might not be any solution at all.
In NYC, according NYC's mayor deBlasio and his racist former-DOE Chancellor, Asians are "white-adjacent" and are often bundled along with "rich white" when it's convenient for them to ignore Asians. Asians make up about 20% of NYC's public school, but they are the poorest ethnic group in NYC.
I'm curious how it's handled in California, considering that Asian's votes taken a bit more seriously.
There's a trivial explanation. If you're Chinese, you gotta be really smart, the top 1% smart, to immigrate into the US. This is also why Nigerian immigrants do so well here. The original European immigrants passed a similar test, as it takes a lot of courage and ambition to move across the ocean in a big wooden boat. But as you know the history, on one occasion, the admission process was violated, and since then America has been paying the price. The price has to be paid in full, for every cause has to be compensated with a result. Call it nation-scale karma, if you want.
From 1860 to 2016 the number of Asian Americans increased from 34,000 to over 20,000,000, according to U.S. census data [1]. The vast majority of that increase took place since 1950, which only recorded a population of 300,000.
Those long established Chinese families represent a tiny minority of Asian American university students. The vast majority are international students or first generation immigrants.
Moreover, Asian American immigrants encompass groups as diverse as Vietnamese and Hmong and Cambodian immigrants fleeing war and persecution, Chinese graduate students coming to study astrophysics and staying, and Filipino immigrants coming to work in healthcare. The educational outcomes of these groups are quite diverse; in fact if you are one of eight children living in poverty with illiterate parents you don't just magically do well in school because of your Asian heritage. If you want some vivid illustrations of divergent Asian American trajectories in the US, check out tensions around the Siskiyou fire...
> Those long established Chinese families represent a tiny minority of Asian American university students.
I’m sure it doesn’t help that admissions discriminate against them because they look similar to the international students and first generation immigrants.
> There are long established Chinese communities in the US who came over to be railroad laborers.
Descendants of those people are a tiny part of the Asian population (though probably formed an important part of the initial cultural support network for later immigrants, at least those settling in the area where those earlier groups were concentrated.)
This argument that populations only send their best to the US may be true today now that immigration is limited and there are large populations of well educated foreigners but its not true for large parts of American history. Most immigration is from the poorest regions- ie Irish during the potato famine, Sicilian Italians, Cantonese from China, Germans in the 19th C, to some extent the Scotch-Irish (well educated but poor) etc.
This is a worrying trend across the board. Everything has to be equal and politically correct, because if not then it has to be racism or something else evil.
The whole thing is a classic case of using averages to drive policy and action.
Your C student with an A doesn’t need your math class, they need an A.
The employer filters all non college graduates and then filters by GPA. With most employers, knowing what you are doing is not ranked 1st or 2nd. Price and qualification is up front.
i’m 100% agree with what you said. When i was in university the math teacher gave us access to previous year exam so we can (study/practice) with them.
I quickly found that we are now getting 40% on those math test which result in an (A+) because they grade in the curve but 20 years ago the real average for this teacher exams where around (75%) and those exam had question of similar difficulty.
TLDR: an A+ today is not the same as an A+ 20 years ago
My complaint about these reforms is that the root cause of the issue is not being addressed. This has long term negative effects. My own anecdotal experience is that what used to be a C is now an A or a B in my classes and I’m passing people who don’t know anything. I’m judged by the passing rate so I’m maximizing that metric. These reforms are just doing what I’m doing but in a less forthright way.