First, California:
In the Name of Equity, California Will Discourage Students Who Are Gifted at Math
Next, Virginia:
Virginia moving to eliminate all accelerated math courses before 11th grade as part of equity-focused plan
They want to ban advanced math.
Why?
Because black and Latino kids make up about 5% (combined) of the classes.
They are most Asian and white, and among the white students, overwhelmingly Jewish.
So in typical Leftists fashion, the correction is to eliminate the successful rather than elevate the unsuccessful.
This is really just anti-Asian and Antisemitic sentiment masquerading as academic concern.
Dekulakization starved 20 million Soviets. The Great Leap Forward starved 50 million Chinese. Both because the smart and successful farmers were put to death or sent to labor camps.
This program won’t help poor black and Latino kids do better, it will just eliminate the next generation of doctors, scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, etc. whose families cannot afford to send them to private school.
The more Leftists change, the more they stay the same. Evil that grinds everyone down to the lowest common denominators.
Looks as if you inadvertently left out the links. On the California math issue, I was reading that this morning:
https://reason.com/2021/05/04/california-math-framework-woke-equity-calculus/printer/
I keep thinking that reality is starting to imitate art . At this point we should just wall off California and New York except for important missions by Snake Pliskyn.
I thought he was dead.
This has been happening for years. When my kids entered Kindergarten there was a “gifted and talented” program. My kids qualified based on “subjective measurements” The program was full each and every year. This continued until 2nd grade. At which point the G&T program was renamed and the “subjective measurements” were changed. The statement was “All children are gifted in their own way.” and the program became diluted with kids that just were not gifted or talented.
I.e. the kid that can’t read but was able to play the trumpet was in the new program.
In the mean time the programs for the “low performing” students kept getting more and more money and more and more programs were showing up.
By the time my kids were in 5th grade, there was not G&T program of any ilk. It had been removed. The money was being spent where it would “do more good.” The smart kids got nothing. The spent their time in class bored.
The teachers in the classrooms were giving maybe 5% of their time to the smart kids and 50% to the “low performing” and 20% to the average kids. The other 25% went into junk stuff that they had to do.
We took our kids out and home school them with the amazing help of a virtual school system. I’ll be glad to PM you info on it if you are in the right state on the discourse if you are interested.
If you are a low performing student, there are 100s if not 1000s of programs and tools ready to help you become “average”. If you are a smart kid, there are 100s if not 10,000s of tools dragging you back into average.
This is just one more step in the same path.
Oh, in our case, it was highly unlikely that it was a “racism” or “equity” between races thing. All of the PoC in the grade school at that time were in the G&T program.
Our schools called it the TAG program (Talented And Gifted). I was in it as a kid for math. They organized multi-school gatherings and seminars to foster and further the students’ understanding of concepts. It encouraged accelerated students to keep accelerating. (Looking back, I recall seeing about as many black and Hispanic kids as I saw in my normal classes. Of course, as kids, we didn’t care about skin color.)
By the time my oldest kids were in school (same district, and same schools in some cases), the TAG program was still there — my kids were also in it for math — but it was a pale shadow of its former self. No additional learning, no opportunities. Just a label on the report card acknowledging the student is good at something, but doing nothing to further it.
Now that my younger kids are in school, it’s not even that. It may or may not still exist, but if it does it probably won’t for long. Oregon liberals have a massive inferiority complex when it comes to California; what Cali does, Oregon soon copies.
Very sad that a program to help advanced kids go as far as they can is being diluted to hold advanced kids back while celebrating under-performing kids.
The dumbing down of education continues in the US. And we continue to fall in the ranking of our system compared to the rest of the world… We’ve already fallen out of the top Ten. And THIS report was from 2017 https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/15/u-s-students-internationally-math-science/
I’m not trying to be a dick (see the only one rule), but where do you get the basis for this line:
“and among the white students, overwhelmingly Jewish.”
I mean, I get the left is anti-Semitic, and maybe because I’m in South Texas where there isn’t a large Jewish population, but there are lots of white kids gifted in math who aren’t Jewish. I’m thinking it’s not so much a Jewish thing but rather a White (and Asian) thing.
I mean, you could also say that the math and science gifted students are also overwhelming male too. For a little gender directed hate.
Just curious as to why you think the white students are overwhelmingly Jewish.
I will admit that is regional, depending on the local population. In New York City and California, Asian and Jewish students were disproportionately represented in advanced math. Read about Harvard’s infamous Math 55 class. Some semesters the class was about 50/50 Asian and Jewish.
Ok, yeah, regional. I am very regional to Texas, with a brief period of time in West Virginia. Guess I saw things differently, so I take it as anti-white rather than anti-semitic. Still, thanks for responding.
I’m surprised that accusations of racism exist in these programs, because as our president told us, “Poor kids are just as smart as white kids.”
In a leftists mind, equal opportunity means equal outcomes.
Consider this “logic” I heard a while back.
Imagine you are having a 100 meter dash race. If you are healthy and exercise, it is like you get a two step head start. If you run for exercise, you get a five step head start. If you compete in any kind of track and field event, or other sport, you get a 10 step head start.
The starting gun fires, and guess who wins? See, it is unfair. (Not kidding. A liberal actually told me that with a straight face, and thought it explained their position on these issues.)
The obvious solution to make the system fair is to change the standards, reducing them. First off, everyone starts at the same point, but if you are overweight, your finish line is at 80 meters, not 100. If you smoke, or never exercise, your finish line is at 50 meters. If you have any kind of non-physical handicap, your finish line is 40 meters. etc….
In other words, in order to ensure equal outcomes, the leftist will lower standards.
Indeed. Heaven forbid we reward the people who put in the time and effort to practice and be good at something. Instead, we should ignore that, call it “privilege”, and reduce standards so people who DON’T work at something can get the same rewards.
I’m reminded of an anecdote (that may or may not have ever actually happened) about an economics class where at the start of the term the instructor offered the students a merit-based “capitalist” grading system versus a “socialist” one where the scores would be averaged and everyone would get the same grade. The hard-working students objected, of course, but they were out-voted by the socialists.
At first, the hard-working students kept doing what they do and aced tests while the lazy students didn’t study and failed tests, and the scores averaged out to Cs for everyone. The smart kids protested that their perfect work was being rewarded with mediocre outcomes, while the lazy students nodded to themselves at their cleverness at “earning” a passing grade without doing work, by getting the smart kids to carry them along.
But the hard-working students felt less need to work as hard — since their most fervent effort would only earn a C — and put in less time and energy in studying for this class: if you’re going to get a C, why put in A-level effort? So they started putting in C-level effort to match the inevitable outcome. The lazy continued not working. And the averaged test scores dropped to D.
Rinse and repeat, and by the end of term everyone had an F. The lazy students pleaded with the instructor to punish the smart kids and make them work harder, but he shrugged and told them there wasn’t anything more he could do, and besides, they voted for this system, they’d have to live with it.
Socialism in action. Everyone failed, but at least everyone had the same outcome. That’s better, right?
Harrison Bergeron wasn’t supposed to be an instruction manual you softheaded morons.
Oh wait, that’s exactly what they want.
This program won’t help poor black and Latino kids do better, it will just eliminate the next generation of doctors, scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, etc. whose families cannot afford to send them to private school.
And thus, it will preserve the elite. The self-exception is built into the system.
All the program does is gut the middle and lower classes of their future successful STEM workers and business owners.
Leftist elitists. It’s not that they hate caste systems; they love them. They hate that upward mobility is possible and so they do everything in their power to eliminate it.
Happening here in VA. We’re getting rid of the entrance qualifications for Thomas Jefferson High School. A STEM centric school that is consistently in the top 5 of all the nations high schools. Boasts a 76 percent minority class…..but not the right kind of minority I guess. Idiots.