Reply to Equitable access to advanced math

Forum Index » Advanced Academic Programs (AAP)

Reply to "Equitable access to advanced math"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
Not true. The issue in SF was around when kids could take Algebra 1, not the content of data science. And even that is not a valid comparison because VADOE never proposed eliminating Algebra 1 from middle schools. In fact, they were discussing having all kids take at least Algebra 1 content by 8th grade.

Twisting the truth is certainly a Republican tactic. [/quote]

VADOE was the one twisting the truth.  They acknowledged in their later sessions that there would be prealgebra content in their 8th grade materials.  Which was obvious as you can't take kids deemed not ready for algebra and suddenly have them taking algebra.  [b]The reality is they were following the SF path of putting algebra in 9th grade [/b]and hiding it behind blended classes called Math 8.9.10[/quote]

False. They also never said that school districts couldn’t accelerate. They always included AP and IB which do require acceleration.

It’s ridiculous to extrapolate out that the entire state of VA would follow in the path of a single school district in CA. School districts in VA are very diverse and have always had a great amount of autonomy to craft a curriculum that best meets the needs of their community.

It’s also notable that the conservatives didn’t freak out when Alabama rolled out some concepts from Catalyzing Change/NCTM.  
https://www.alabamaachieves.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/2019-Alabama-Mathematics-COS-Rev.-6-2021.pdf

It’s all politically motivated faux outrage. 
[/quote]

They never said specifically the words "districts can't accelerate" but they did say things like, heterogeneus classes will be used, everyone will take math 8 in grade 8, 9 in 9th, 10 in 10th (which would be a reorganization of those courses current content); that advanced learners would be handled by teachers using "differentiation" instead of jumping ahead; that studies showed that some students that took AP calc would end up re-taking it in college anyways so it wasn't important to push high schoolers to take it;

Sure, they didn't explicitly say "no acceleration" or "no calculus" but they definitely implied and said that calculus in HS was not a priority/desirable; Also, for those of us who could think this through, it was pretty obvious that taking the current 8th, 9th (Algebra), and 10th (geometry) standard classes, then mixing them up for those grades, then giving you 11th and 12th grade to take whatever math classes you wanted, was not going to put you on a path to take calc in HS (because both Algebra II and Precalc are year-long courses - so you'd run out of time to take all the Calc prereqs unless you took a second math class somewhere, or took something over the summer, which would condense a year's worth of learning into 10 weeks.)

So sure. the words "districts can't accelerate" weren't uttered, but when they said "this is what we're doing" it was very clear that acceleration was not part of the structure; they weren't trying to hide this until there was public outcry, then they tried to be a little more sneaky and say things like "districts still can accelerate" but there still wasn't room for it in their plan.

The town halls might still be on youtube. Anyone can go watch them and see. It's not just republican extremists; there's lots of liberals on this forum who just happen to care about their kids' educations. Hell, there was a highly respected state university STEM professor on one of the Q&A sessions taking them to task over this. [/quote]

Detracking was minimally discussed.

If detracking were such a critical part of the ideas they were tossing around they would have included it on the infographic. It wasn’t.

They did however include AP/IB on the infographic from day 1.

And they weren’t saying “this is what we are doing”, they said “we are very early in a years-long process that will eventually develop a proposal for public feedback. Right now we are just starting conversations with stakeholders”.

And they never define what or how districts accelerate. Even today. Go look at the current VDOE SOLs - it doesn’t lay that out for school districts. School districts have always had the autonomy to define their own classes and accelerate students as needed. The only thing defined by VDOE today are standards for Math 6, Math 7, etc. And yet those are not the only classes offered - many school district offer advanced and accelerated options.

Maybe some gullible people got caught up in it but the falsehoods and outrageous speculation around it were definitely pushed hard by the RWNJs. Including Youngkin. 
[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics