The actions that the California state education system towards Blacks and Brown kids are exactly what the most insidious racist person would do. If I hated Black and Brown kids, I would lower the education standards so low that these kids would graduate high school being unable to compete at the city, state or country level. And this is EXACTLY what is happening. Half of the Black kids in SF are graduating high school and can barely read.
Now with the gutting with math, Black and Brown kids will be even further behind on math than the rest of the demographics. It's horrifying.
Anyone who has money will avoid all this by either sending their kids to private school, which is what we did, or getting enrichment classes after school. Both of those options are unavailable to lower income kids, so the gap between the haves and the have nots will only increase at an exponential rate.
There is nothing more racist than the of lowered expectations in the guise of ruinous empathy for "the poor victims of white supremacy". You help undereducated kids by raising expectations, and pumping money into the system so that the student teacher ratio plummets in the poorest areas that need the most help. Instead SFUSD was spending millions to change the names of school instead of trying to get those kids to learn how to read.
I have both of my kids enrolled in SFUSD and what you describe is exactly what's happening. Majority of “affluent” parents and immigrants are enrolling their children in Sylvan, Kumon, hiring Russian instructors, and so forth. Even school counselors will suggest this, as they also enroll their own children in such programs and subtly encourage you to do the same.
However, if a child belongs to a disadvantaged group, then they're out of luck. There's virtually no assistance available for them. While the district does offer free after-school and extra classes through SF State, these require a significant amount of paperwork which, as you probably know, necessitates full involvement from both parents. Essentially, the system is set up so that disadvantaged children don't receive the help they need.
It's a truly racist system. Yet, they can freely post on Twitter, touting how great and progressive they are.
I think a major problem is that most education "experts" (the type policy makers listen to, not practicing teachers) are upper-middle-class kids who had their parents teach them the basics of phonics and times tables. Who else would get a PhD in education?
They went to school, and found learning these things a massive waste of time, because their parents had already set them up to succeed, but they don't realise it was their parents doing all the work and it's not a waste of time or just "common sense" to the kids who didn't have the same home environment.
The bottom of the average of SAT scores of college attendees is the top 30%+ of students; Master's and PhD's are even more elite. This is like saying "the defensive line in the Cleveland Browns are the worst NFL players in the country": they're still NFL players.
Your misunderstanding is a great example of why we need better statistics education.
62% of recent high school graduates attend college (Bureau of Labor Statistics). 1 in 1,282 high school football players joins the NFL (0.078%). Your math is wrong by almost two orders of magnitude.
Attending college does not make one "elite" and equating the likelihood of getting a degree in education with the likelihood of joining the NFL is nonsensical.
That doesn’t necessarily negate their point. What % of students attend a four year college that requires the SAT? If a student attends junior college they wouldn’t need an SAT (among other pathways to college that don’t require it).
They didn’t source their statistic so it could just be made up but I think the general point that those that achieve an EdD were above average students seems likely.
People with money homeschool, with much better results. There's even small homeschooling groups that pool resources to hire the best tutors money can buy.
Homeschooling is exploding exponentially, doubling from 2012 to 2023 and a large portion of the parents who pulled kids from schools during COVID simply aren't going back.
Understandable, because the quality of education is extremely poor. Unqualified parents homeschooling literally produce better outcomes.
Not to mention the violence in public schools (which is escalating), and the abuse from teachers that the major US teaching unions ritually cover up (the teacher's unions vehemently defend predator teachers).
Teachers unions are in the business of protecting predators, financially and with predator-friendly policy like union-decided arbitration venues. [1]
>Also, it can't possibly be exponential because the US population is not growing exponentially
This is completely wrong. The fraction of home-schooled students could e.g have been increasing from 0.02% to 0.04% to 0.08% to 0.16% even if the overall population wasn't growing at all, and that's considered exponential growth. Clearly there are indeed problems with US maths education.
Almost anything that is described as "exponential" isn't really exponential, if the curve is describing a real-world quantity. Real-world quantities tend to be subject to limits.
I'm an annoying pedant regarding the word "exponential", which is commonly used (especially by journalists) simply to mean "grows fast". I think it's fair to call a curve "exponential" if the relevant part of the curve approximates to exponential.
Now with the gutting with math, Black and Brown kids will be even further behind on math than the rest of the demographics. It's horrifying.
Anyone who has money will avoid all this by either sending their kids to private school, which is what we did, or getting enrichment classes after school. Both of those options are unavailable to lower income kids, so the gap between the haves and the have nots will only increase at an exponential rate.
There is nothing more racist than the of lowered expectations in the guise of ruinous empathy for "the poor victims of white supremacy". You help undereducated kids by raising expectations, and pumping money into the system so that the student teacher ratio plummets in the poorest areas that need the most help. Instead SFUSD was spending millions to change the names of school instead of trying to get those kids to learn how to read.