"The Math Myth and Other STEM Delusions"

[bcrowell]

There is a course on EdX titled "The Challenge of Global Poverty" that presents the results of an evidence based study on tracking. It found in India that tracking produced an overall gain. The better students went further and the weaker students went further. They suggested that the good students were held back by the weak and the weak were demoralized by the strong.

This is very interesting, but India has specific characteristics that don't translate to other places. Big parts of their educational system are completely dysfunctional (K-12 teachers who draw a paycheck but don't show up, business students in college who spend their classes chanting definitions of terms in unison). They also have massive corruption in educational admissions.

The US is nearly unique among industrialized countries in not doing more tracking, but there's a reason for that, which is that we have social fault lines that make tracking vulnerable to becoming a tool for discriminating against individuals based on their race and class. Compared to Europe, we have a lot more income inequality, our big cities have a lot more immigrants and a lot more linguistic diversity, and we have the legacy of slavery and systematic racism, including severe racism against Latinos. Where I live, in Orange County, California, Latino kids back in the 50s went to inferior, segregated schools, and the young ones worked as "ratones" (literally, "rats") climbing orange trees to pick the fruit that was inaccessible by other methods.

 

[houlahound]

What you guys think about standardised testing where staff careers are hinged on the results.

I am reading about how this has caused a lot of corruption and cheating due to performance pressure.

 

[Andy Resnick]

There is a broad consensus in the US that education is a public good. I'm using "public good" in the nontechnical sense: that education is widely believed to help society in general. There are several completely different ways in which education can be a public good:
<Snip>
Andrew Hacker's opinion piece cites poor numeracy in the US, and says that "We should be doing better," but he doesn't explicitly say why he thinks it's important that we do better. <snip>

I can't read Hacker's mind, but I propose a 4th reason why numeracy taught at the K-12 level is a public good:

4) Numeracy helps create an informed population.

My rationale is that numeracy, especially statistical numeracy, is an increasing feature in the news: surveys, public health studies, demographic studies, etc. These data are often used as 'inputs' into creation or modification of policy, yet average citizens who elect people to represent their interests are wholly unable to make sense of conflicting reports and are thus unlikely to be able to rationally represent their own interests. Examples abound.

Average citizens are increasingly reliant upon statements made by 'experts' even though those same citizens are generally unable to ascertain if that 'expert' is an expert or a crank. Again, examples abound. Cranks should not be responsible for policy.

 

[mathwonk]

this seemed to me like a well informed and well reasoned critique of hacker's book:

http://www.slate.com/articles/healt..._great_example_of_mathematics_illiteracy.html

 

[symbolipoint]

this seemed to me like a well informed and well reasoned critique of hacker's book:

http://www.slate.com/articles/healt..._great_example_of_mathematics_illiteracy.html

Basic Numeracy was too difficult for me to learn. Several weeks of remedial instruction and one year of beginning algebra in high school changed this for me. How is this change to be understood and why is this change so difficult to support?
( read some of the article but none of Hacker's report).