Doubt it all you want, but destroying TJ and the other advanced specialty schools has been a goal of the Virginia “equity” movement for a few years now, and the whole thrust of this proposal is to get rid of accelerated instruction.
Another data point: The San Francisco School District whose “Math Course Sequence Policy” setup I cited in my last post also includes at least one STEM-specialist school of its own, the Galileo Academy of Science and Technology. They seem to offer a whole bunch of advanced STEM classes, so the 2014 adoption of this math course sequence structure by their school district apparently hasn’t hamstrung their ability to serve high-achieving STEM students.
Their course sequence is the same used in most places including Virginia now. Their new plan seems to offer the option of one-year acceleration.
Two-year acceleration in math is common for anyone noticeably above the average in Virginia and many middle schools in the Fairfax area offer three-year acceleration.
Again, this is simple pigeonhole principle - if you can’t complete the sequence of math through geometry until 10th grade (whether that sequence is rigorously sorted into prealgebra/Algebra I/geometry as it is now, or mixed into an “essential concepts” approach) then you only have two years to take anything beyond geometry. Since almost everything beyond geometry requires trig and analysis, then effectively you must take that in 11th grade and you only have one year to take anything else, and that “anything else” can’t be something that requires calculus as a pre-req since taking calculus before 12th grade is now impossible.
Nobody is well served by so-called “gifted” tracking that just feeds slightly-above-average students through an accelerated math course pipeline that’s not giving them an adequate grounding in the fundamentals.
Please cite the claim that the accelerated programs in Virginia are producing an inadequate grounding in the fundamentals to such an extent that it would better to totally abolish them than try to address over-generous admission at the margins.
The people who illegally replaced test-based admission to TJ with a “holistic evaluation” aka race-balancing, the Education Secretary railing about how magnet programs shouldn’t exist, the teachers and administrators complaining about “too many Asians,” the legislators who sponsored HB 2305 - we’re getting close to some areas I’ve been forbidden from discussing but the fact that the first post of this thread links to people running the department of education who spell out in so many words that their goal is “equity” above developing talent should suggest that such a thing as “a movement of people with power in Virginia in favor of equity” does, in fact, exist.
How can it be the case that “removing tracking and teaching all students as if they were high achievers” (direct quote from the report you cited) is the actual and desirable goal of this reform, and that too many students are being put into advanced classes that they aren’t really prepared for?
Are standards too high or are standards too low? Should we be teaching everybody calculus in high school or nobody calculus in high school? It can’t be both at the same time.
Given that Virginia is the #5 state in math education even though it started behind the 8-ball with hugely segregated and underfunded public schools as recently as the mid-70s, do we really have either problem, or should well enough be left alone? What about the current system possibly cries out for such a radical change if one’s approach looks at anything at all besides “equity” and allows for measuring actual success at teaching math even a little bit?
I’m not allowed to discuss magnet school admissions on this board, but you should be able to find both the ongoing court case and the previous one fairly easy in a news search.
There is no such thing - equity means crippling the more talented instead of developing them. That’s exactly what this proposal will do.
You can either recognize that people are different and give each student the appropriate instruction, or annihilate their differences in a war on reality that will end with everyone at the level of the least skilled. There is no third option.
This is crazy talk, but I know you believe it whole-heartedly so it’s not worth discussing.
I would still love to see a cite that TJ (or any other school) can’t advance students or otherwise differentiate within the math classroom based on this new curriculum.
That sounds fine to me. The vast majority of high school students should not be advancing beyond introductory calculus in their math curriculum, and most of them, as I said, would be better served not trying to get to calculus in high school at all. As this article notes,
I’m all in favor of letting students double up on advanced courses to the extent they can handle them and take whatever enrichment courses they have opportunity and ability for. But the 1-3% of all high school students who really can benefit from such extreme acceleration as reaching calculus early in high school, and moving on to advanced college math before graduation, should be doing that mostly through specialist schools or the early-enrollment college-course approach.
Why should these students be denied opportunities to take the appropriate courses at the schools they attend? In Northern Virginia you have 30+ high schools offering Calculus BC with over 85% of students passing the exam. This is thousands and thousands of students every year who need, deserve, and can handle advanced math education. What is the benefit of dumping all of that off on the community college system? Doesn’t transit cost money and time (possibly locking the student out of another class)? What about students who don’t have the generational knowledge to navigate enrolling in college at age 16, or the financial means to expand their school day to ten hours or six days at the cost of a part-time job? Forcing people to take these classes at a college penalizes the people that public schools are supposed to serve and creates a bias towards the wealthy and connected, and to serve what goal - the banishment of advanced math from high schools in the name of equity?
OK, this part I know is misleading, because I watched the video you posted. BC Calc will still be offered. Nothing is changing regarding the highest-level courses being offered, just the path taken to get there. The educators presenting the curriculum were extremely clear on this point.
But as Engineering major that took lots of high-level college math, I will back up @Kimstu that many of my fellow-students (most of who took BC Calc) had shockingly bad algebra, trigonometry, and geometry skills. More depth spent on those subjects would have been much more useful than the prestige of taking the Calc BC AP test.
Again, this is not some random district in Ohio where you might have 6 or 7 kids a year capable of doing Calculus AB and you need someone from the local college to teach them. 85% of Fairfax County students who take the BC exam score 3 or higher, out of easily 2000 or more who enroll in the class every year. Is the exam too easy? If you can pass it with “shockingly bad algebra, trigonometry, and geometry skills” then I guess it must be.
“Eliminate ALL opportunity for post-calculus education in high school even in places where it has been shown to be useful and necessary” seems like a very extreme solution to the problem of inadequate higher-level math instruction in totally different areas of the country.
If I understand you correctly, you seem to be saying that “teaching all students as if they were high achievers” equates to “teaching all students calculus”. No, I don’t think that’s what the report is suggesting or advocating.
Well, based on the materials you linked to and various National Council of Teachers of Mathematics reports over the past few decades, the main “radical change” sought is a re-evaluation of school math content.
Personally, I have a lot of reservations about particular aspects of proposals for, say, prioritizing probability and statistics and data analysis over traditional geometry and trigonomety, but there’s no question that they are at least addressing an issue that does need addressing. We should not be mindlessly continuing to treat calculus as the default form of “peak math” for most high-school students, or designing high school curricula to get as many students as possible into a calculus course. There are other areas of mathematics that are arguably more important for many students to focus on.
Yeah, I agree with this. I like that statistics and financial modeling are included - that is very useful in many fields (way more so than Calculus). Also additional geometry modules.
In fact, this idea that Calculus is “real math” is extremely short-sighted and only really applies to physics and engineering (and even then many branches of engineering don’t really need it).
As someone who did well in math as far as my high school allowed, I would have loved to have had the choice not to go to calculus but try another advanced mathematics course. There are tons of math teacher videos discussing things I find much more interesting but do not really understand because calculus was as far as I went.
Agreed! We should track students who will not be using math after high school into a few years of practical economics and statistical reasoning classes that will help them be better citizens and managers of their lives, then let them use most of their time in 11th and 12th grade on learning skilled trades so that they are prepared for life after high school.
We should track students who will be attending college as humanities majors to cap out around Calculus AB, which provides insight into the workings of the natural world and is a good stopping point for someone working in a non-scientific field who wants to honestly claim a well-rounded liberal arts education.
We should track aspiring social scientists into rigorous statistics courses.
We should track people who plan to major in math or hard science in college to master Calculus BC concepts no later than 11th grade and explore higher-level math in the senior year setting in order to help them decide if this is really what they want to commit to.
In other words - we should teach things that make sense for the goals and ability of each student, in the schools they attend, using more tracking than we use now, not less.
How does this proposal to eliminate ability distinctions, tracking, and post-calculus high school math in their entirety serve those ends?
Tracking gives you two or three options–at least, it did at my school. You got your remedial math where you took two years each of Algebra I and Geometry. You had the normal track that would get you Algebra I & II, Geometry, and Trigonometry, and then you had the AP path that got you pre-algebra and Algebra I early, letting you do Algebra II, Geometry, Trigonometry/Precaluculus, and Calculus I.
That tracking sure leaves a lot to be desired, IMHO, with nothing that seems remotely about tailoring it to the math each student might actually need.