Dumbing America Down

On the off chance that you have not taken your daily dose of unhappiness pills, here’s a story-- actually it’s two stories-- that will make you feel like you do not need them today.

If, perchance, you believe that the Supreme Court had given us a push toward a more meritocratic nation, especially in the world of education, you should prepare yourself to be disillusioned. The thrust against merit, the thrust toward idiotocracy, is still active. 

When it comes to dumbing down America’s schoolchildren, administrators and teachers’ unions are on the case. They have already damaged children by closing down schools for two years. Even the New York Times recognized that these children are probably not going to make up for lost learning.

As for the tried and true method, the one that works to improve the academic performance of minority children-- that would be charter schools-- government bureaucrats and teachers unions want to put them out of business. 

A serious country would never allow this to happen. Ergo, America is no longer a serious country.

Sorry to be the bearer of ill tidings, but alas, sometimes misery is the right and proper reaction.

Anyway, today’s madness exists in Cambridge, Mass., and San Francisco. 

The most surprising is Cambridge, Mass, home of Harvard University and of MIT. There the public school system has stopped offering advanced math in middle school. No more algebra for eighth graders.

The reason, you can probably guess, lies in a statistical disparity. The grandees who run the school system discovered that children of color were invariably not testing into the algebra courses, thus producing a racial segregation. Their solution, down with higher math.

The Boston Globe reported:

Martin Udengaard wants more for his son, and he doesn’t think Cambridge schools can deliver.

Cambridge Public Schools no longer offers advanced math in middle school, something that could hinder his son Isaac from reaching more advanced classes, like calculus, in high school. So Udengaard is pulling his child, a rising sixth grader, out of the district, weighing whether to homeschool or send him to private school, where he can take algebra 1 in middle school.

Being as the administrators were not smart enough to consider the consequences of their racist policies, they were surprised to learn that parents of the better students simply hired math tutors. They were not going to allow school administrators to damage their children’s education.

Thus, the disparity between Asian/white students and children of color perpetuated itself, even more than before. 

“The students who are able to jump into a higher level math class are students from better-resourced backgrounds,” said Jacob Barandes, another district parent and a Harvard physicist. “They’re shortchanging a significant number of students, overwhelmingly students from less-resourced backgrounds, which is deeply inequitable.”

As for the damage caused by this nonsensical approach, the administrators are trying to overcome it:

The issue, they say, is that without taking algebra 1 in middle school, it’s difficult for students to reach advanced classes later that would better prepare them for STEM college degrees and career paths — although not impossible because Cambridge high school students can “double-up” and take two semester-long honors math classes in a single year.

Of course, the war against math is not limited to Cambridge, MA. In San Francisco, school administrators are doing their best to undermine math education for middle schoolers. Since they too have noticed racial disparities in math achievement, they have declared math to be racist and have replaced it with anti-racism math.

The New York Post editorialized:

As progressives want to do everywhere, California is destroying math education in the name of “equity.”

The state’s new “math framework” for public schools ditches traditional instruction to emphasize “self-identity” and collaboration in lieu of actual math skills.

It aims to keep all students in the same math courses until 10th grade — no longer grouping students by skill so the kids who can learn more get the more advanced instruction they need.

The result will be far fewer kids able to take advanced classes (calculus, or even algebra), and more “slow” children denied the chance to gain basic skills.

Seriously: The new guidelines push transparent nonsense like “math identity rainbows”: Each student is to pick a color representing his or her individual strength — communicating, perseverance or numerical reasoning (i.e., actual math) — with an eye on teamwork in a supposed “mathematical community.”

If you would like a true measure of the stupidity of these school administrators, consider the results that New York City’s Success Academy eighth graders achieved on standardized Regents algebra exams. The New York Post reports that these tests are normally taken by eleventh graders.

All Success 8th-graders took multiple Regents, tests meant for 11th- and 12th-graders. These charter kids — mostly low-income black and Hispanic students, i.e. the children the left claims simply can’t be expected to do well on standardized tests — knocked them out of the park. 

Some 99.8% passed the algebra Regents; 47% scored a 5, the highest mark. In English, 94.6% passed; in biology, 96%. 

And younger kids kicked butt too, with Success 7th graders taking the global history and geography Regents and 90% passing. 

If you and I know these results, surely the administrators in Cambridge and San Francisco know them too. And yet, they are blinded by reality and push ahead with their woke schemes, schemes that will damage minority children for life. Apparently, they do not know how to teach math, so they are content to damage children's minds, for life.