YHK - yet another hacker news clone

California passed SB1410 which protects access to Algebra, which is a little weird in and of itself, but there it is.

Keeping the "clever poors" in their place seems to be one thing the left and right agree on.

The result is we have control only at the local school district level, which is typically run by a board of locally elected citizens with no idea what they are doing and no experience in either education or running large organizations. The school boards are popularity contests that controls tens and hundreds of millions of dollars with no discipline.

Predictably, in that environment actual learning is dumbed down as far as it can go. Social promotion is rampant, as is grade inflation and things like coloring books being used as far as middle school grades. Huge monies are spent and wasted on technology and consultants.

In NJ, they need to add in hard-core oversight of budgets and get rid of the massive focus on "equity" and social issues, and get back to the Three R's. They are starting to go in that direction with elimination of "screens", but it is being done in a hamfisted way.

When I was a kid, our 1-6 grades were letters (E, G, S, N) that generally corresponded to "above, at, below, well below expectations" The point was to detect what needed extra attention and to help guide focus of the parents and teachers. 30 years later my kids have the same thing but the labels are a bit different. Grades 7-8 introduce A-F and then high school is just percentages.

I've also seen the opposite in a relative's reaction to their kid getting number grades. They fixated far too much 3 or 4 points either way and not the general signal.

Not to mention, Proletarianization of Universities (Rabfaks), which accelerated prep schools attached to universities designed specifically for adult factory workers and peasants who lacked formal secondary education. They also built what were essentially trade school-like institutes to rapidly educate people on medical, pedagogical, and polytechnical studies.

If anything the Soviets were far more serious about education than their western peers and one of the reasons they become a world power so quickly.

There must be a middle ground between setting the bar so high that you will find only the diamonds and setting it so low that almost every rock out there will pass.

Three factors were at play: 1)Not much dumbing down, if you don't get it, you will barely scrape through. The system was not primed for holding back everybody down because of a dumb minority.

2) A dedicated effort to identify the smart kids, direct them to focused high quality schools, encouragement to get involved in serious competitions (mathematical olympiads, but also correspondence seminars) and math clubs.

3) Not so much distracting options to do other interesting things (very unlike the west), so much easier to actually attract and keep the smart kids interested.

The education system is in much worse state now - both 1) and 3) are gone, and 2) is severely affected, mostly by 3).

The top 6 countries in the annual PISA test are all asian countries where uniforms are mandatory in public and private education (China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Singapore, HK)

Furthermore, having good textbooks papers over the fact that in the U.S. the qualification and ability of teachers vary so much across poorer and richer school districts. A smart student in a poor school district can use the textbooks to a greater advantage.

But also, look at where almost all technological innovation has happened in the last 50 years

For the top talented "the west" has the approach to do individual focus, with focus classes and prodigies and all that. It may not hit everybody whom it should and may waste some potential here and there, but it's less scary too and I don't see that it's an obviously worse approach to this skill bracket. (Two data points from top of my head: Terence Tao and Magnus Carlsen, both widely regarded as absolute top in their field, grew up in "the west".)

For the average person, trying to make math approachable and following peoples instincts and interests could be helpful too. I know lots of folks "in the west" for whom even basic math goes over their heads, but I also have quite a few acquaintances from the soviet era who were beaten so hard with advanced math that nothing stuck and they have equal much trouble with very basic math. The conclusion isn't obvious either, to me.

It relates to whether the most competent mathematician is also the best suited person to teach. I'd argue, no. Deep competency in math is a requirement, sure. But so is a firm grasp on pedagogy. I've had my share of excellent math researchers as professors who were utterly incompetent when it came to teaching. Similar with text books.