Do you have a cite that a “math learning disability” is even a thing, or did you make it up?
Here it is~not that you asked nicely.
Modnotes:
This posts has crossed into personal attack zone. Please do not do this again.
This also crosses the line. Please do not do this again.
It’s tricky. I’ve got some pretty serious reservations about what Virginia is doing here. A basic principle of education is that all students deserve a year’s education for a year in school: with compulsory education, we do not have the right to waste a year of a child’s life. Proposals that keep kids in math classes studying subjects they’ve already learned are unacceptable.
That said, I sure as hell don’t want to be on the same side as the toxic, elitist, pedagogically-ignorant folks who are dominating the “anti-Virginia” side of this thread. It’s very difficult to remind myself that their vacuous arguments aren’t the only arguments against Virginia’s proposal, and as a result, I find myself moving closer to Virginia’s position every time I read one of those posts.
It was a pretty average school. My parents chose to send me there because the school I was geographically supposed to attend was an actually bad one with lots of bullying and poor results. Some of the teachers were engaged and made an effort, others were just marking time before retirement. But the particular difficulties I mentioned were clearly caused by the lack of tracking, and were particularly evident in science lessons.
As for the dumbing down, this was due to the government publicly ranking schools according to results, while schools were able to choose which privatised exam board to use for exams and course materials (because privatisation and competition are supposed to be the answer to everything 
). In that situation there is tremendous pressure on the schools to choose the board that offered easier exams or more lenient marking, and consequently pressure on the exam boards to do those things.
The result was a steady reduction of content and difficulty in all subjects and a steady increase in the percentage of pupils getting ‘A’ grades.
I agree with this, by the way. If you’re going to have tracking it should be per-subject, and it should be easy to move between tracks for kids who are struggling or who have improved. Nothing should be set in stone early on.
It’s a noble idea, but I’m not sure the people in charge of education really care. They mostly want to produce more worker drones who’ll do their jobs without complaining and without demanding such inconvenient things as better pay and conditions.
It’s not like they send their own kids to public schools.
Absolutely. The key to something like this working is training the teachers and providing the tools to allow for true differentiation in the subject matter. I have no doubt that there is a way to teach adept math students geometry that will provide a deeper, broader understanding within the context of a geometry course that is taught for all students. However, that will require a lot more effort (or use of computer-based tools) than many teachers currently put in. The current crutches of “have the smart kids teach the others” will not cut it.
I agree that I have a lot of hesitation.
This is perhaps the easier way to improve the system. Make the tracks far more fluid. And try to convince college admissions that a student that didn’t take the hardest possible course the high school has to offer isn’t necessarily a student they should disregard (perhaps this has already happened). And probably try to reduce the number of tracked subjects (we had tracked English, for example, which I think was actually a bad idea - you lose a lot of perspective when analyzing literature when your discussions only include a homogeneous portion of the student body).
We have to balance the needs of the high-achieving students with the needs of the rest of the student body. If there is evidence that segregating out the top 20% is increasing bad outcomes for the 80% I think it’s pretty important to at least try to come up with solutions. But those solutions need to have lots of data and resources behind them to convince the parents of the 20% that it’s not a case of lowering their students achievement in order to raise the level of the others. While that may be a noble and ethical calculation, it will only cause those families to leave the district.
Really? I am 100% certain that no student board member would ever get elected in my district if they didn’t send their students to the public schools.
Or do you mean at the state level?
This is entirely wrong headed. The problem is not that teachers are just being lazy and not willing to put the work in. Do you have any evidence that that’s the problem? It’s incredibly difficult to find a good math teacher these days–if it was a job you could slack at and make decent money, they’d be beating down the door.
To really differentiate, you need more teachers and better training. You need more teachers both to reduce student/child ratios and also to increase planning time. How can anyone provide detailed feedback on tests and quizzes to 150 students, and develop responsive, tailored lessons based on the insights from that feedback, when their teaching to planning ration is 3-1? How can you follow up with struggling students, talk to parents to develop plans at home, figure our the socio-emotional stuff? It’s both way too many kids and not enough time. I don’t know elementary school, but I assume it feels about the same.
English really isn’t “literature” nearly as much as it used to be: the focus is increasingly on non-fiction and academic writing.
It really bothers me that the default assumption in this thread is about “smart” kids and “normal” kids. IME, in math in particular, it’s as much about effort as anything. We have a 99% pass rate on AP Calculus. The standards to get into our program are not super strict: basically, if you are a solid B student in 8th grade algebra, you’ll probably get in. I have no doubt some of our kids wouldn’t make the “calculus” track at a “normal” school, and if they did, they wouldn’t pass the exam. But we treat math the way the Art school treats band: you practice three hours a day–half in school and half at home. And the norm, the expectation, is success. I am sure that some people are just naturally “bad at math”, but over 20 years of watching math instruction, I’ve also really come to believe that the great mass of people can learn math at a very high level, if they put the time in.
I feel like “tracking” should be more a talk about “letting kids who want to work really hard have the option” and less “letting kids whose inherent qualities are superior have the education they are entitled to”.
I’ve seen lots of kids whose natural abilities seemed average at best go on to look an awful lot like a “gifted and talented” kid just by working really really hard. And I’ve read a lot of college application essays that were basically that story starting in elementary school: students who realized that to escape poverty they needed to work harder than their peers, and so they fought for the opportunity to do so. Very rarely do I read an essay about a kid who realized they were just more capable than their peers and so put in the same amount of work but ended up in a more advanced state.
Your homework takes as long as your in class time? Is it really a good idea to have students have 14 hour days? Or do other subjects give less homework?
Imagining 1.5 hours of homework per subject per night seems horrible to me, even if I assume you are splitting subjects up over the week (which is the only way having a 1.5 hour class makes sense).
Unfortunately, a teacher looks good if the students that teacher teaches score real high in the subject that teacher teaches, and not if the students score somewhat high overall. The problem of total time needed for all homework assigned has been a problem for many years, and has been seriously addressed only fairly recently.
For freshman and sophomore year, math is double blocked, so they have 90 minutes a day (plus geometry and Computer science). And no, other subjects don’t give as much homework. We are a STEM magnet. It’s not for everyone. It’s for kids who really want to be good at STEM, which starts with being good at math.
It is probably not 90 minutes of homework every night. But if you aren’t getting it, that’s the expectation until you do.
Again, the point is you don’t have to be a genius to do do advanced math. For most people, it’s enough to be determined.
In our town a woman whose kids attend a $60k a year private school spent a previously unimaginably large amount on a campaign to get on the school committee. She lost narrowly, but garnered a lot of support from older people, libertarian small business owners, blue collar anti intellectual types, and Trump supporters (obviously huge overlaps).
Her platform was to basically gut school budgets for everything except academic enrichment for the top 10% of students and sports. Opponents took to calling her approach “Yale or Jail” but she and her supporters perversely took it as a compliment.
I would support that. I think you’re right that it’s more beneficial not to track in some subjects.
I’m not convinced it’s that noble. In my view helping talented/able/hardworking/interested/whatever students to succeed is at least as much for the benefit of society as for the individuals. Because having the best person do the job benefits everyone.
Yeah, I was thinking of politicians, though maybe it is the school boards mostly making these decisions. Wonder how many have kids at the schools in question?
That’s interesting. I’d have said maths is one of the subjects most dependent on innate abilities. Which is not to say someone can’t succeed by hard work, but IME they are very unlikely to want to pursue the subject beyond what is compulsory.
This is to some extent a myth, and a dangerous one.
This is silly. While I’m sure that some education leaders have the wrong incentives creating worker drones is way down the list. Their number one incentive is to keep their job; this usually means keeping the parents happy.
I’m with LHOD; I’m dubious of the proposals but the rebuttals are even more suspect.
I thought that, as a young teacher. But 20 years of watching kids learn math has made me shift a lot more firmly to “hard work” camp.
Certainly, if your math experience is positive, you’re more likely to be willing to work hard, but by and large, kids who put the work in are successful.
There obviously is some kind of innate component, since I did well in maths at school despite not working particularly hard. I would try to help other kids who were struggling and they just didn’t get it, despite putting more effort in. And the other thing I noticed was that fairly often people who did well in other subjects would do badly in maths and vice-versa, which suggests it uses somewhat different skills. If it was just down to hard work, kids ought to be at the same level in every subject.
Maybe it’s better to believe hard work has the biggest effect, but that’s a different question.
I would agree with this, but only if we really look at what putting in the work means.
If parents aren’t going to teach the kids so much as how to count before kindergarten, that’s work that some families are doing and others aren’t that creates a skills gap right from the get-go. If every time we suggest holding everyone to high standards by making them do work produces pushback from middle-aged adults still complaining about homework, or cries denouncing “rote memorization” (which is basically progressive educode for ‘actually learning anything’), then the work is not being put in. If we go to the doctor and get medical certifications that our brains aren’t good at math (“dyscalculia”) then that either means we need to work all the harder to overcome the problem, or that there may in fact be some genuine differences among people after all.
And, eventually, we still have to confront the fact that asking someone in high school who has no plans to go to college at all, let alone major in math or physics, to “put in the work” to keep up with trigonometry at the same pace as the top students a bad use of limited educational time, and having them “put in the work” to learn plumbing is going to produce a lot better life outcome for that person than trying to track everyone into the same classes.
It happens. Here are cases in Florida and Maryland, for example.
How would this work with something like math?
For example, if you have:
Track 1 = 8th grade math → algebra I → algebra 2 → geometry → trig/precalc in 12th; and
Track 2 = algebra 1 → algebra 2 → geometry → trig/precalc → calculus in 12th;
how do you move between tracks? The kid in track 1 who has improved greatly and finishes algebra 2 with very good grades isn’t going to be ready to move to the equivalent position in track 2, skipping geometry and moving directly to trig/precalc, and the track 2 kid who has lost his way moves over into track 1 only be repeating a course.
(I suppose if you have separate class sections for “Algebra 2 for 10th graders on track 1” and “Algebra 2 for 9th graders on track 2,” you could shuffle the kids between them, maybe, with the improving kid getting a little deeper into the subject and the struggling kid getting a more superficial study, but an algebra 2 class has to cover roughly the same body of material no matter who the students are, and in the districts I’ve seen there is a single combined "Algebra 2’ class with each section having a mix of several grade levels.)
(San Mateo-Foster City currently starts this tracking into a separate progression of classes in sixth grade; @ZosterSandstorm’s big objection is that they want to start separate tracking in 7th grade instead.)