"Black Americans receive about 7 percent of the doctoral degrees awarded each year across all disciplines, but they have received just 1 percent of those granted over the last decade in mathematics."
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/18/us/edray-goins-black-math...
And this is the current production! You don't want to see the statistics regarding the number of African American faculty members in mathematics!
So what else is our current system perpetuating besides inequality? What exactly are we "weeding out" in calculus? Or college algebra?
We don't let kids trust themselves intellectually in the classroom.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02765...
Just one example of many.
Everybody's talking about the problems with schools, but the issue is the enormous gap in economic inequality that is just growing larger and larger. Parents who have to work 2-3 jobs to support their families don't have the time or energy to devote to supporting their children in their academic lives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
Mind you, perhaps American High Schools are poised to stop this....
This school takes really deprived kids and gives them a great education. But it gets a lot of grief.
Edit it's an old article I believe they now have ex students attending Oxford and Cambridge.
Do you have some links and maybe some elaboration on the point you're trying to make? From my short reading, it sounds like the narrative is that the disaster gave both sides the political cover they needed to make the concessions they've long known they needed, and allowed effective reform to happen. Is that what you're suggesting?
[0] https://www.aft.org/news/truth-about-new-orleans-schools-aft...
When educators and administrators try to saint themselves for pushing pass rates to 100% at all costs, parents should be skeptical and look at the outcomes: kids who graduate high school and don't know how to read or do basic math, etc.
Of course we need to do something for children whose home life is not conducive to learning, but more detail is needed before we can deem any particular approach praiseworthy. Some schools would like nothing more than to pass children through without being responsible for any learning occurring.
A small (effectively zero) positive correlation was found between the amount of time a student says they spent on homework in elementary and achievement, but a slight negative (effectively zero) correlation was found when looking at the time parents reported students spending on it.
These measures don't show a causal relationship: "good students" are more likely to do homework. "poor students" are more likely to take a lot of time to complete the same amount of homework.
Elementary student reports of time spent on homework are not reliable. Parent reports are even worse.
The only causal evidence of a benefit in assigning homework in elementary comes from two short-term intervention studies: whether giving a homework take-home worksheet about vocabulary improves performance on the next vocabulary test (it seems so, very slightly). The longest term observational studies show a negative effect.
Reminds me of the Key & Peele sketch 'If We Treated Teachers Like Pro Athletes' [0]
Now that I think about it I'm not sure if the ASCIT Disneyland trips were actually annually. I know that ASCIT did one in my frosh year, which was 1977-78, and I'm sure they did one in my junior year because I took advantage of a lot of people being away on that trip to try magic mushrooms. I didn't want to have to deal with a lot of people while tripping.
That didn't quite go as expected. As I wandered around campus enjoying the hallucinogenic effects of the psilocybin, I kept running into Chinese people I did not recognize, many of whom were speaking Chinese.
Walter of course knows this, but for the rest of you Caltech is small enough (under 1000 undergrads) that one should be able to recognize most of the other students on sight. Also, the percentage of Asian students at Caltech was a lot lower back then, so I could tell most of these people weren't Caltech students just by the shear number of them.
I was starting to freak out a little bit because I'd read up on the effects of psilocybin before trying it and highly realistic full sensory interactive hallucinations of Chinese people was way outside the bounds of anything I expected, so I thought something might be going really wrong like the 'shrooms I bought were laced with something else.
It turned out that I was in fact seeing real Chinese undergraduates--but not from Caltech. I was not the only one who decided to take advantage of the campus being a little less crowded that night. The Chinese Students Association had decided to throw a party and invite all the Chinese students from all the other schools in the Los Angeles area including UCLA and USC.
They (ASCIT, not CSA!) were still at least occasionally doing this at least up to the mid '80s. There's an article in an '84 issue of the Tech [1] that mentioned Disneyland trips as one of the things that wouldn't be happening if not for ASCIT.
[1] https://campuspubs.library.caltech.edu/1221/1/1984_11_02_86_...