In this increasingly complex technological world, what can our school systems do to help students excel in advanced math?
Well, here’s a novel approach: “Cambridge Public Schools no longer offers advanced math in middle school,” The Boston Globe reports.
Hmmm. Rather counterintuitive: Take access away from students.
Silly me, helping students master advanced mathematics isn’t even on the list of concerns for this Massachusetts city’s “education” officialdom. “The district’s aim,” explains The Globe, “was to reduce disparities between low-income children of color, who weren’t often represented in such courses, and their more affluent peers.”
By reducing the learning opportunities for all.
“School districts throughout the country are moving to axe certain academic standards such as advanced courses, grades and homework in the name of equity,” The Daily Caller informs, “in California, a high school recently stopped offering honors courses because the courses were failing to enroll enough black and Latino students.”
The impetus behind these moves is racist and wrong. Moreover, the results are both predictable and pernicious: “limiting advanced math to students whose parents can afford to pay for private lessons.”
“They’re shortchanging a significant number of students,” one parent complains, “overwhelmingly students from less-resourced backgrounds, which is deeply inequitable.” This is the case because many of the more affluent parents can afford to bypass the antagonistic public schools and get their kids the education they need to succeed.
Public schools are increasingly throwing in the towel on teaching low-income and many black and brown kids, deciding that racial “equity” can most easily be achieved by taking away educational opportunities from white and Asian students.
Is this where the logic of public education leads — race as an excuse to play Procrustes, sawing off the tops of our heads to make us “equal”?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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2 replies on “Counterintuitive?”
Misdeeds by school officials, by teachers’ unions, and by the US Department of Justice have shown pretty much everyone that, as a practical matter, the state-run schools cannot be reformed to advance the educational interests of children. So parents who love their children but cannot afford to pay for private-school tuition on top of their tax burdens support educational vouchers. Granted that Paul and other people over-estimate the share of parents who love their children; still that share is enough that the movement to effect a voucher programme in each state can only be stopped by a wholesale subversion of voter representation. And most parents who don’t care about their children will seek to keep-up appearances by sending their children to schools that develop better reputations.
The conspiracy to somehow redistribute academic excellence is largely a termite conspiracy — its participants have a shared objective, but lack much central coördination. And, lacking that coördination, they seem to have got ahead of themselves. Moreover, the school conspirators may have effected terrible damage to the wider project of establishing a neo-feudalist order, because the state-run school system has played such a vital rôle in that project.
Of course, the termites will work hard to regulate the policies of schools allowed to accept vouchers, in order to make these schools agents of the corporatist left, rather than of parents.
Dumbed down kids are easier to rule over.
Quite simple, really