I don't live in CA and this isn't my circus, but I have some things to say about math education. From the statement:
> We write to emphasize that for students to be prepared for STEM and other quantitative majors in 4-year colleges, [...], learning the Algebra II curriculum [...] in high school is essential.
Problems with math are one of the most common reasons why students encounter difficulties in STEM education and careers. The most common problem is difficulty with high-school level algebra.
I agree, fundamentally, with the relevant premise of the CA effort here (and agree with Aaronson's criticism of its implementation). That premise is that you shouldn't have to be on an accelerated track in middle school in order to take calculus in high school. And yet... the fact is, we get a lot of adults in college or graduate school pursuing STEM degrees, who have shaky foundations in high-school algebra.
Just looking at the "typical" math track in US high schools it does seem a bit arbitrary. Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II, Pre-Calculus, Calculus--this is the most common math track I see, with accelerated students starting Geometry in 9th grade, Calculus in 12th grade.
The thing is... individual performance is highly variable in math classes, and to make sure that everyone gets good foundations in mathematics, we see high-school mathematics curricula that repeat the core algebra concepts in different classes. This repetition and focus on fundamentals is why the division between classes seems so arbitrary--what is presented as a sequence of classes is really more of a unified curriculum spread across multiple years. When you combine these two factors (variable performance, repetition in the curriculum), you end up with a population of high-school students who develop good foundations in algebra early on and are bored by the repetition, and a population of students who really benefit from the time spent mastering algebra, and it's hard to serve both.
I think we can figure out a way to let high-school students take AP calculus in 12th grade without expecting them to take Algebra I in 8th grade, and we don't need to push everyone into calculus faster in order to do it. And yet, my experience with high-school education in the US has left me very cynical about it. Letting students progress through the high-school math curriculum at the right rate requires a kind of "personal touch" that seems to only happen to individual students when their parents are involved, but not pushy. It's rare. The school system would rather do the easy thing (everybody moves in lockstep to the next class in the sequence), and parents are largely either uninvolved or overinvolved.
(This is more or less what the article says, I'm agreeing with the article.)
Considering the fact that the vast majority of students aren't going to go onto 4 year STEM degrees, it doesn’t make sense to track all students towards that goal.
I feel as though there is too much focus on giving everyone more or less the same type of mathematical education in high school. This is probably due to limited resources (ie teacher availability and class sizes), but ideally there would be room for a more varied approach wherein students don’t need to have every year build on the next if the aren’t STEM tracked. Too many students fall behind and never are able to recover. Math class just becomes dead time, and those that do make it to college end up retaking the same subjects over again.
> Considering the fact that the vast majority of students aren't going to go onto 4 year STEM degrees, it doesn’t make sense to track all students towards that goal.
It sounds like we agree 100% on that point.
I'm mostly thinking about the students who are going into STEM degrees later in life, who will (hopefully) come from varied backgrounds in high school and middle school. If you decide in high-school that you're interested in STEM, then it makes sense to develop solid foundations in algebra during high-school. Just like it doesn't make sense for all people to take math like a STEM major, it doesn't make sense to fast-track all future STEM majors to take calculus in high-school, and it doesn't make sense to make decisions in middle school that lock students out of high-school calculus.
The thing that confounds this is that people overvalue high-school calculus as the ticket to a STEM degree, when (like the article says) many people would be better served by developing stronger foundations in algebra. And public schools are generally not good at educating students at their own rate & level.
> We write to emphasize that for students to be prepared for STEM and other quantitative majors in 4-year colleges, [...], learning the Algebra II curriculum [...] in high school is essential.
Problems with math are one of the most common reasons why students encounter difficulties in STEM education and careers. The most common problem is difficulty with high-school level algebra.
I agree, fundamentally, with the relevant premise of the CA effort here (and agree with Aaronson's criticism of its implementation). That premise is that you shouldn't have to be on an accelerated track in middle school in order to take calculus in high school. And yet... the fact is, we get a lot of adults in college or graduate school pursuing STEM degrees, who have shaky foundations in high-school algebra.
Just looking at the "typical" math track in US high schools it does seem a bit arbitrary. Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II, Pre-Calculus, Calculus--this is the most common math track I see, with accelerated students starting Geometry in 9th grade, Calculus in 12th grade.
The thing is... individual performance is highly variable in math classes, and to make sure that everyone gets good foundations in mathematics, we see high-school mathematics curricula that repeat the core algebra concepts in different classes. This repetition and focus on fundamentals is why the division between classes seems so arbitrary--what is presented as a sequence of classes is really more of a unified curriculum spread across multiple years. When you combine these two factors (variable performance, repetition in the curriculum), you end up with a population of high-school students who develop good foundations in algebra early on and are bored by the repetition, and a population of students who really benefit from the time spent mastering algebra, and it's hard to serve both.
I think we can figure out a way to let high-school students take AP calculus in 12th grade without expecting them to take Algebra I in 8th grade, and we don't need to push everyone into calculus faster in order to do it. And yet, my experience with high-school education in the US has left me very cynical about it. Letting students progress through the high-school math curriculum at the right rate requires a kind of "personal touch" that seems to only happen to individual students when their parents are involved, but not pushy. It's rare. The school system would rather do the easy thing (everybody moves in lockstep to the next class in the sequence), and parents are largely either uninvolved or overinvolved.
(This is more or less what the article says, I'm agreeing with the article.)