The article lost me with the claim that there’s some sort of “push to de-emphasize STEM.” As near as I can tell, they think this is something recent, but in my experience it started in the 1970s and the emphasis on increasing emphasis on STEM since the mid-2000s is the course correction that’s taking place now.
"In the name of “equity”, California DOE’s 2021 Mathematics Framework attacks the idea of gifted students and eliminates opportunities for accelerated math.
- no grouping students by ability
- no Algebra for 8th graders
- no Calculus for high schoolers
What an idiotic thing to do. This will absolutely hurt women and underprivileged people far more than privileged men, and it will result in a lot gifted people refusing to cooperate.
Lol you should actually read the thread and replies. It may calm some of your fears. The author does a whole lot of backpedaling after being called out for the fact that the DOE’s proposal does not, in fact, eliminate HS calculus.
Edit: The “lol” wasn’t directed at you by the way. I found it funny that the author of that thread was making a big deal about “the elimination of HS Calculus” and then immediately followed it up with a bunch of hemming and hawing about how that wasn’t true.
> I found it funny that the author of that thread was making a big deal about “the elimination of HS Calculus” and then immediately followed it up with a bunch of hemming and hawing about how that wasn’t true.
From what I've gathered in the thread, the actual official recommendations appears to be simultaneously recommending and not recommending the elimination of HS Calculus.
Note that getting rid of tailored instruction does not just "eliminate opportunity for accelerated math", it also makes it harder to access remedial math instruction promptly for those who need it. This is how you get students who can't quite grok negative numbers or fractions when they're in a frickin' Algebra I class. It absolutely hurts vulnerable students.
Of course the most common 'solution' is then to get rid of "advanced" stuff like Algebra as a graduation requirement altogether, which is an even clearer disservice to students and their surrounding communities.
For those of us not in the know, could you explain how the report is bad? It doesn't remove 8th grade algebra or 12th grade calculus, so it's not bad for those reasons. So far so good. What does it do that is bad?
I do not yet have kids, but shit like this is why i already have a bank account saving money for private school. This move will not produce more equality - quite the opposite. All those whose parents can afford it will be in private school learning Algebra, and the rest will be left behind.
This is already happening in a significant way. See also: why funding schools with property taxes is objectively evil.
The only mitigating factor is Khan Academy and its surrounding ecosystem. A motivated learner with internet access can excel in spite of the school system.
Ugh, the "incorruptibles" fallacy but in a different format.
"Pull yourself up by your bootstraps! So and so came from a violent environment with food scarcity, and THEY succeeded, so you can too!" - Nevermind that that person's environment produces generation after generation of poverty (hence, "cycle") and violence.
Khan Academy mitigates nothing - it's a structural failure.
whats wrong with it? My AP Calc in high school classes (two semesters) in Virgina (Halifax Country) was just as good as Calc 1 in college.
I wished I had skipped it. Calc 2 was the class that I found challenging.
I also in high school, I took Pascal as a learning to program/into class. I college I learned Ada, and it was a breeze due to my high school.
I feel thankful to my last year in public school in middle of no where, rural VA, as it gave me great education/foundation that I did really well in college.
I feel bad, as now Virginia is doing the same crap with math in the name of equity. Dumbing things down to the least common denominator is terrible, especially for smart/capable immigrants like I was. We don't have the luxury of private schools, and public schools are starting to pull the rug out as well.
That’s because all of these so called “gifted students” flunk our first semester calculus. We have to implement curves just to get them through to higher level math courses. Which they also struggle in because they only needed to get 40% on that Taylor Series test to get through second semester.
Ap calc is a joke from my perspective. I’m not sure how to solve the crisis, but it’s plain to see that American students that test into calc are woefully underprepared. I’ve tried to advise students to start with more fundamental courses, but they’ve been told they are “gifted” their whole lives. They ignore you and charge into calculus. Then they come back when the semester is about to end to reassess options. Just like that, what would have been another perfectly serviceable American engineer is lost.
Calculus is a joke anyway, colleges should just teach real analysis which will go through the same material in a way that's actually rigorous. If the students are lacking in mathematical fundamentals, teach those via discrete math and linear algebra.
Approaching 40. Haven't ever needed calculus (or Trig) for anything. Sometimes I make an effort to pick math back up just because I feel like I ought to, but it'd be so purely a hobby with no practical use that I have a hard time keeping at it. Some of it's neat but it's not really any more valuable to my life than doing even-less-useful-but-more-fun recreational math puzzles.
Most people's lives and jobs involve even less math than mine does.
More stats probably would have been helpful. Anything less-obviously-useful needs a hell of a lot more emphasis on what it's used for and how to apply it than I ever received, IMO, unless you're a pure-math major, and certainly in k-12 since almost none of the kids are going to be math majors.
I have a degree in math and physics. I only used one tiny bit of calculus once in my career - say, maybe a month total...
... and then I got a new job when I was 43, in medical x-ray machines. Suddenly everything was 3D coordinate transforms, Fourier transforms, and integrals, plus radiation physics.
Hahaha, see, I'm so terrible at both measuring and cutting that I'd never expect anything I'm building to come out remotely right if I needed to start doing much with angles that aren't 90, 45, or 30, with hard pre-sets on whatever tools I'm using because if I'm setting the angle myself it's gonna be off by enough to ruin it, no matter how precise I think I've got it. No way I'm not gonna end up working around or re-doing it with something simpler if I start bringing trigonometry to the party. I'm lucky when my straight cuts that I measured and marked 3 times "just to be sure" don't somehow end up wrong.
[EDIT] actually, I take that back, I do sometimes work with odd angles but never do it without a physical template built and fitted, because attempts to do it "cute" or figure it out purely on paper have a history of being hilariously wrong (when I do them) even when the math is 100% correct (according to the evidently-not-precise-enough measurements).
I remember there was some sort of push to shift from STEM to STEAM, where A is Arts. And that signaled to me that other groups of people were trying to pile on to get access to funding opportunities. It also means a dilution of focus. STEM is already pretty broad. This article is all about fabs. That is a very niche part of STEM. How do you make sure the U.S. becomes strategically focused on developing the skills for running fabs if there's such a political debate over the importance of various majors who want to be incorporated into an already broad category?
Teachers aren't just piling on for funding. Like the blog post you linked says, teachers find that creative/artistic applications of technology/science/math/engineering tends to increase joy and interest in students. Push back to this "shift" feels like: "Back in my day, we wrote accounting software and called it STEM"
My point is that STEM is already too broad as it is to focus resources on chip fabrication. Neither Accounting Software skills nor Interior Design skills should be eligible for funding for this stated purpose. But certainly diluting STEM just causes us to move further from that goal. The types of approaches to early education are going to be more broad, as is necessary (and LEGO drone kits sound like a great approach to that), but a student has to specialize as they advance to higher education, and if we're not funneling enough students into the critical categories, we can lose all of our strategic advantage in technology.
There is a superficial push to "get more people into STEM". But STEM is undermined by reducing competitiveness. What we are creating is a watered down and un-competitive STEM
I agree in part. I think we have a major weakness in general competence, resourcefulness, tenacity & technical ability that would be needed for a large segment of production– like your welding factory example.
But much of the growth and competitiveness will come from very sophisticated industries requiring highly specialized STEM experience.
Think of a Tesla or Space X company. You need both a large number of competent technically skilled people. But they are powered by an adequate and smaller number of very highly specialized researchers and engineers designing the product.
Both of these segments are lacking investments in the USA
> But they are powered by an adequate and smaller number of very highly specialized researchers and engineers designing the product.
It doesn't work this way. You will get very smart people knowing what to do.
But they will not come to work in your city if there will be no factories to make their smart designs, and hire them.
Many tried, many, many to just have RnD shop, and ship everything else to China.
It did not work even for Apple for example. Most of their engineering has moved to China, and they are very shy getting public about this fact. People in Apple RnD office in Kerry Plaza for example were for years forbidden to even disclose the fact that they worked for Apple.
> As near as I can tell, they think this is something recent, but in my experience it started in the 1970s and the emphasis on increasing emphasis on STEM since the mid-2000s is the course correction that’s taking place now.
I believe what underscores the current problem is STEM being something special, while current "elite" STEM high school is what used to be a normal school curriculum 60-70 years ago.
Everybody miss the fact that curriculums were much more small, compact, pushing, and focused in the West before everything from basket weaving to "business education" managed to sneak into high schools.
A conservative, and supposedly "elite" high school in Russia in nineties-noughties were all having more hours, and very few subjects.
Mine were 8 classes 5 days a weeks of:
- math
- physics
- geometry
- engineering
- chemistry
- language
- pe
- biology, literature, history, geography, informatics, 2nd foreign language, military education, professional education as electives
And even math, and physics there wasn't anything too fancy. We used textbooks with more hardcore, and grinding emphasis on arithmentics, and analysis/linear/diffeq/stats were put in the last 2 years almost as an afterthought. In physics, they actually removed almost all of curriculum quantum stuff, and put even bigger emphasis on Newtonian mechanics, and Landau-Lifschitz classics for everything else.
The school tried to introduce art as was required per new Russian curriculum, but it was quickly thrown out after a year due to militant opposition from parents.
By the time the change to school focus percolates through and hits the labor market the shortages will have moved around. See: Electrical engineers 1980-2000.
It's all bollocks, of course. There are hardly any jobs in Science or Mathematics, not really that many in Engineering, and among "Technology" the only genuinely massive sector is software ('eating the world', or so I hear).
So in reality what this massive "STEM" push amounts to is an excuse to trick children into wasting their time going thousands of dollars into debt getting useless degrees in mechanical engineering or mathematics before they can attend a Javascript bootcamp to become actually-employable.
If you are any good at mechanical engineering or math, you can find a job in those fields. If you're not very good, learn Javascript. It works itself out.
The article lost me over a much more basic point: its unstated and unexamined assumption that "STEM", and indeed education and society in general, needs to be centrally controlled. For example, consider this right at the end:
"What I insist that we do is to refocus our STEM education debates on the right question. And that question is not “Who deserves what"?”. It’s “Who will run the fabs?”."
First, where does he get off "insisting" anything? If he's so gung ho on improving education, why is he wasting his time writing a blog post instead of going out and doing the hard work of actually educating some people?
But even leaving that aside, why do "we" have to debate this question? "We" don't determine who runs the fabs; the companies that own the fabs do. Nor do "we" need to centrally control what education kids get; the fact that we have a huge, bureaucratic, centrally controlled public education system in the US is a bug, not a feature. But not to this author; in fact, he is basically arguing for expanding the central control model of education:
"[T]he notion that the purpose of education should be to discover and elevate natural talent is fundamentally flawed, as the entire previous section of this post argued. Finding a few kids capable of defeating China in a math competition is useless compared to the task of training millions of kids to work in high-tech export industries."
So now the education system is supposed to do job training for specific skills? Didn't that used to be called "apprenticeship"? And didn't it used to be done as a private thing, without having to drag a huge, bloated bureaucracy into the mix?
And what, exactly, is wrong with the idea that education should discover and elevate natural talent? Isn't that exactly what you want if you want to have the best chip fabs? Not to mention all the other good things the article mentions. (The author does argue that the belief in "natural talent" has bad side effects and that what should be focused on instead is "long-term motivation". But then he saws off his own branch by admitting that "what people want to do is ultimately more important than what they’re told to do." And when kids are subjected to education to "improve their long-term motivation", they see it, correctly, as being told to do things they don't want to do. The only handle that any education system can really grasp with a kid is "natural talent"--what do they naturally want to do? What are they naturally interested in? And our regimented, structured, centrally controlled bureaucratic education system is perfectly designed to entirely ignore that input--and not just ignore it when deciding what kids will do, but kill it when it is detected, on the grounds that it's disruptive.)
To this author, the "millions of kids" are just cogs in a machine, to be moved around to wherever the central authority thinks they will do the most good. (But of course he isn't any such thing.)
I'm all for encouraging more kids to go into STEM and to improving the incentives involved so more kids who are interested in STEM will see it as a viable career. But we don't need to make ourselves into China to do that.
There is no need for apprenticeships. The labor glut makes it easy to pick the cogs who trained themselves and avoid the useless cogs that didn't train themselves at all or in the wrong subject. Useless cogs aren't even a drag for the private sector, they actually fuel it through student debt.
If one were to create a strawman of the most capitalist, greedy and shortsighted kind then there would be nothing more beautiful to that strawman than consumption without income, because it allows wealth inequality to grow without hitting macroeconomic limits that would otherwise prevent the relative wealth of the strawman to grow beyond a certain point.
You're right that there is no need for more central control but how else do you get out of this trap?
> On international tests of reading ability, the U.S. scores well above the average for developed countries, but in math we score below average.
The average is completely irrelevant here, and this is important because we could burn a lot of money, and make a lot of children miserable, by trying to move the average up.
What we need is as many students with exceptional math abilities as possible. I'm not going to offer my opinion on good ways to do this, what I am going to point out is that moving a bunch of students from the global 40th percentile to the global 60th is completely irrelevant, we have no evidence that it would be good for those students, and we shouldn't do it without a compelling reason, which this isn't.
Keeping students who could be 99th percentile from ending up 90th due to sub-par education, and lack of opportunity, would be a very big deal.
Let the Chinese run them. At this point they're far better at it than we, and we should focus on our core competencies like adtech and slowly reimplementing the past few decades of computing infrastructure in Rust and JavaScript.
This is probably a moderately controversial statement, but I’ll occasionally browse the open jobs of various companies and one thing I’ve noticed is the “more technical“ (purposely vague) positions are outsourced ,typically to India or China. I’ve seen a few where there were almost no dev or engineering roles in the US, just marketing, various business roles and low paid service stuff.
I’m very concerned about how our welcome push for equity and representation has been evolving from pulling underachieving people up to pushing overachieving people down.
You see this in canceled AP courses across the country. You see this in the deemphasis on testing outcomes (SAT for example). And you see this in challenging classes being made easier, or focusing on group work rather than individual contributions.
A while ago I read about how a school started introducing Khan’s material into classrooms. It increased GPA on average. But it had a much greater effect on white and Asian American students, so it increased the achievement gap, and was canceled outright rather than improved. So a program was canceled that increased student performance… insanity.
The politics of inequality simply provide one the ability to advocate for their interests at the expense of others' while avoiding rational dissent and social stigma.
> I’m very concerned about how our welcome push for equity and representation has been evolving from pulling underachieving people up to pushing overachieving people down.
I would be interested in seeing any historical evidence for this, because I’m a bit skeptical. This is something that swings back and forth, based on the location where you live and what happens to be popular. I remember advanced classes being pulled in the early 1990s. Then at some point, focus returns to the gifted students. Then you get No Child Left Behind. It seems to be partly a cycle and partly just a bunch of unintended consequences.
> You see this in the deemphasis on testing outcomes (SAT for example).
SAT isn’t a good test. GRE is worse. They should be deemphasized.
This is BS. I was in the room during the doctoral defense of an experimental student who got his PhD and went to work for Lam Research and he couldn’t answer any of the theory questions I asked him about his work without my prompting. Why does it need a PhD, because the companies don’t want to train you on the job?
US PhD students... and US labour market in general..
I always had a feeling of it being rather skewed towards the top. Top US companies are being too spoiled by the labour market. They are too used to the idea of being able to recruit people who they think are on the top of the ladder of educational achievement.
Instead, they often just employ expensive, and not that much better cadres.
Such emphasis on "talent" in US is because US companies cannot do much with regular hires these days, always thinking they can get ready made specialists from the job market.
When the entirety of employers start to think this way, and just headhunt increasingly more expensive, and barely experienced people from each other, then things start to go downhill.
