...but also completely disingenuous.
Student X is an only child, has educated and well paid parents who instill work ethic and have the means, time and ability to commit to helping X get the best grades, including hiring tutors for things they can't or don't have time to teach. X lives in a safe, affluent area and associates with similar peers.
Student Y is one of n siblings to an illegal immigrant single mom with little to no formal education who works two minimum wage jobs so has no time to help her kids even though she desperately wants to. Y might even be working too just to enable the family to get by, leaving no time for studies at home or homework. (effectively having more work ethic than X, just not for school) Y lives in a dangerous area with sirens blaring and dogs barking all hours of the night and many of his peers are involved with gangs.
Granted, these are obviously exaggerated and hypothetical stereotypes, which I don't really want to contribute to perpetuating, but they illustrate a point. You don't exactly have to be some kind of bleeding heart social justice activist to see how unfair it is to Z to be "objectively graded" as lacking "performance" when compared to X.
A common objection is "well how are we going to indicate who is the best candidate for a given university admission or job if we don't have grades or other objective measure to filter out the best people!??!???"
But... that's the point we're trying to make: current grades and other "objective measures" DON'T filter out the "best". To an overwhelming degree, they're just proxies for other things. Surely universities and employers can and will find better ways to assess candidates. (or, if that's what they want to insist on continuing to do, filter out underprivileged people, just like they do now)
TLDR the delusion that grades are some kind of objective meritocracy is ridiculous the sooner it's done away with the better.
To be clear, schools can't fix all the worlds injustices. Life is unfair and realistically we may never be able to fix that. But we can stop doing this that are making it blatantly more unfair than it has to be...
Same. For me, though, it took going back and becoming a teacher to see how privileged I was. Mom was a teacher, both parents at home and contributed to my education from an early age (like, doing math as soon as I could talk "How many people are in the car? What if your grandparents were here? Your uncle? What if we took the grandparents away?", etc), etc. My friend group was all in the same situation. Two parents at home, etc. It wasn't until I came back to the school that I realized how insulated I had been and how it wasn't me that was the reason I did so well (Valedictorian), but the support I had behind me that enabled me to do it.
I'm also a teacher and, although you can teach college without knowing any formal pedagogical methods, I've at least looked into the works of people like Louis Benezet (setup a middle school without formal arithmetic) and Ranciere (The Ignorant Schoolmaster). And I've come to the conclusion that backing away from homogenized curricula most hurts 1) bad teachers and 2) textbook companies.
Sadly, no. I hate to sound like one of those 'gifted' people, but a lot of it just came naturally. I never learned how to study; university was a rude awakening, though I still didn't really learn until after graduating there when I started self-studying things.
> Realistically, people like you and I who had a stable upbringing probably would be successful in any reasonable system.
Exactly. I'm thinking now to all my classmates and what they did after. The ones who didn't struggle in school (not necessarily excelled, but they didn't struggle), were all those who had stable households. As far as I'm aware, minus a few who got into opioids (rural America!), most are doing well for themselves. It really does impact a lot.
> I personally attended a poor middle school and didn't learn algebra until 9th grade, but still managed to end up as a mathematics postdoc at a very nice place.
Awesome! Mathematics is what I've started self-studying (I did physics, now dong a physics/applied mathematics masters), and it's super interesting. Just proving stuff is so much fun.
> I cannot wrap my brain around the reluctance to make changes to the system in the face of statistics like the one I mentioned elsewhere and have observed with my own eyes (that is, there are very, very few African American PhDs in mathematics).
Exactly! Part of me thinks it's because it forces us to look behind the curtain, so to speak. If we look at why, we realize it's because of the socioeconomic factors, and then we have to look at what caused that, etc.
> although you can teach college without knowing any formal pedagogical methods,
Sadly, I sometimes wonder the validity of education research. Formal pedagogical methods certainly helped me (I did a MAT while teaching, and there was a noticeable difference), but I really didn't become a decent (wouldn't say I'm good yet) teacher until I had a coworker who really was great and took and interest in explaining things and working with me. It really changed my whole outlook on teaching.
> And I've come to the conclusion that backing away from homogenized curricula most hurts 1) bad teachers and 2) textbook companies.
Absolutely. I'm a huge proponent of public schools, but part of me has really wanted to start a charter school. There would be one major requirement when hiring: the teachers have studied the subject. So your math teachers all have math degrees, English teachers have literature degrees, etc. I think this would really work for lower levels, as you get teachers who are interested in it (instead of being taught math by a teacher who isn't a 'math person', which rubs off on the kids), but because they also understand it at a deeper level and can hopefully find new approaches to it. No textbooks, either. Hopefully it'd be small enough that they wouldn't be needed. Also, at least at a younger level, no homework and let the kids actually be kids and play. I'd argue at least an hour or more recess a day, and a long lunch.
I'd certainly be interested to hear some of your ideas for moving away from the homogenized curricula, and will be looking into those two you mentioned. Thank you!