Posted on 04/23/2021 5:28:37 AM PDT by MtnClimber
This is the path of national suicide, as Sam Dorman reports for Fox News:
The Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) is moving to eliminate all accelerated math options prior to 11th grade, effectively keeping higher-achieving students from advancing as they usually would in the school system. (snip)
"[A]s currently planned, this initiative will eliminate ALL math acceleration prior to 11th grade," he said. "That is not an exaggeration, nor does there appear to be any discretion in how local districts implement this. All 6th graders will take Foundational Concepts 6. All 7th graders will take Foundational Concepts 7. All 10th graders will take Essential Concepts 10. Only in 11th and 12th grade is there any opportunity for choice in higher math courses."
The intellectual gifted among us are a precious resource needing careful cultivation, for they create new knowledge that grows our economy and keeps our national defense strong. This is so obvious that it ought not even need stating.
Educating down to the level of the lowest common denominator will ultimately impoverish and militarily defeat us, a national catastrophe. Ads Richard Baehr asks, rhetorically:
“Do you think China will try this to achieve equity among their various peoples?”
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Communism has always failed. But, it appeals to those who did not learn history.
Your actually getting dumb downed teachers who are in a system that is dumbing down students, on various levels, who are excusing the dumbing down in the name of ‘diversity’ and ‘equity.’
Your = You’re
So Americans of Asian and European descent start after hours or weekend accelerated math classes and leave the uneducated and math ignorant behind. Math is inherently RACCIST.
“Dumbing down schools in the name of ‘equity’”
They’ve been doing that for years. Now it’s official.
This is the way it used to be in the 70’s, and the result was that bright kids got bored and tuned out. Given the proliferation of online gaming I don’t think there is much of a chance that their time will be spent on alternate educational pursuits.
This is all so ridiculous to defy credulity. If I were the parent of a gifted child I would opt out for private schools or tutoring. Parent should considering challenging this in the courts. After all the parent pay for these public educational factories.
If you send your gifted child to a public school, that child in the future will be drugged, subjected to heavy head trips, etc.
Harrison Bergeron becomes reality.
The schools have already been oriented to give good grades if you are willing to jump through all their hoops regardless of how silly. I think that is already muddying the issue so gifted and talented in this country was already a mess because under the current scheme willingness to put up with silly bullcrap is “gifted and talented.”
Hopefully this will eventually lead to school reform, choice, vouchers etc. Which be the best thing ever for African Americans in the cities.
What the hell are Foundational Concepts 6 & 7 and Essential Concepts? It seems that schools are in the business of not only dumbing-down children, but also obfuscating what is being taught so parents have no idea what is occurring.
When we homeschooled our daughters, I was mostly responsible for teaching math and science, although my wife could step in at any time and teach those subjects because all of the material was basic and straight forward. Her formal education was in CompSci so she certainly had the background. My teaching math and science was just a division of labor.
One of the things we did with curriculum is what we called chunking. It's a basic idea of decomposing subject matter to be learned. There is an order to those chunks, particularly in mathematics, that has long been known to be effective for learning.
Labeling what is to be learned is very important. You do not tell a child you are learning Foundational Concepts. You tell a child they are learning Arithmetic. Yes, very old fashioned. Further more you chunk the information into a group of lessons. For instance, Addition and subtraction of single-digit numbers. By the way, it takes multiple lessons to learn this chunk. Each lesson is given a name, so the teacher and the child know exactly what is to be taught and what is to be learned.
When schools label a course with a moniker such as Foundational Concepts, we end up having an abstraction not easily understood by parents and definitely not by children incapable of abstract thought. Why hide what is being taught? Is it to keep parents from helping their children to learn?
There is a much greater problem here than having poorly a labeled curriculum; and one that I contend is the reason why so many children get lost in mathematics. The idea of withholding the teaching advanced math until the 11th and 12th grades means some children will repeat the same lessons over and over again; grade after grade. That's down right boring and unchallenging. Kids lose interest. They never see a purpose for the mathematics and its applications. They give up.
When we homeschooled our kids, we moved to the next topic in our curriculum after mastery of the current topic. Since nearly all topics built upon and used prior topics there was little need to review. It is amazing how little time needed to teach and for children learn. We were able to complete what a government school should have been teaching in a school year in a couple of months; and instruction was rarely more than 15 minutes per day.
Did it work? Yes. Before going to college they completed multi-variable calculus with analytical geometry, linear algebra, and calculus-based probability and statistics. The science they learned (Chem and Physics) was calculus-based. This isn't rocket science. It is just learning one lesson at a time and moving on after mastery.
It must be true math is racist.
Communist Socialism still has appeal even though it has always failed. The statement “WE will do it right the next time!” is always replayed with the same results.
On the other hand, Nationalist Socialism was tried once, and that was enough!
I think our school system is totally screwed up at this point, and that it doesn’t serve our nation’s interests. In prioritizing obedience by giving high grades to students who hand in all the assignments we are rewarding students who can either make lots of paperwork or who are adept at cheating but that are not necessarily better able to comprehend. That explains a lot about our world right now.
We should be adopting best educational practices from other countries that are doing a consistently better job of this, like Singapore, Canada, Slovenia.
Great post! 👍
I’m reading that home-schooling has doubled in the last year.
I have been paying attention to education ever since I tried to figure out what my kids would really need. I discovered John Dewey and his sappy band of socialists in the early 1900s and their plan to make American education one that created little socialists so that by now we would become a socialist nation and would want to rip the Constitution to shreds.
I also discovered the plan in the 1970s to experiment with the inner city schools by implementing techniques that would produce children who could not read and were functionally illiterate - perfect fodder for a dictator down the road.
The reason why they started with the inner city schools was that inner city moms are mostly single and are easily distracted enough that they would not complain like suburban moms.
Worked like a charm.
Then when they had learned what they could about reacting to parents and they saw the end result of their distorted teaching, they then moved their teaching to the suburbs.
As a result of my research I ended up putting my children in private classical Catholic schools, good classical charter schools and I even spent 7 years homeschooling. When I put them into college we made sure they went to as close to classical colleges as possible. My daughter went to Hillsdale College, one son went to the University of Dallas, and my two other sons went to a good college where lots of down-to-earth horse-sense type of farmers kids go to. They all learned how to think.
So, “equity” is a word that sounds good to people who don’t know what it really means which is the dumbing down of all the kids so that everyone is easy to lead to serfdom.
Good for you, totally agree. My picture I was told, was on the pretend dart board/cork board at the local H.S. because of my prolific letters to the editor of the local weekly.
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