Like many readers of HN, I've taken a lot of math over the years--at least 25 semester long courses at the university level. So I have well informed opinions about what works and what doesn't work for me; schools, on the other hand, have to educate everyone. This, perhaps, accounts for the wide range of opinions being expressed here.
I think that we can agree that the whatever they are doing in the United States isn't working very well. According to the scores on the PSIA math test given internationally to 15 year olds, the US ranks behind 21 other nations [1], well below the international average. Why not pick, say, the top four countries, (recently South Korea, Japan, Switzerland, and the Netherlands) and adopt their methods that are working? Instead of dreaming up new approaches that have no quality research justification, just teach math in a manner that is already known to be significantly better.
>I think that we can agree that the whatever they are doing in the United States isn't working very well. According to the scores on the PSIA math test given internationally to 15 year olds, the US ranks behind 21 other nations [1], well below the international average.
Americans do well on PISA compared to their ethnic relatives. (<https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-new-2018-pisa-school-test-sco...>) Asian Americans do better than Asians; whites do better than Europeans; Latinos do better than Latin Americans; and blacks do better than Africans.
Hispanics and especially blacks' scores drag the US average down. Both white and Asian Americans score higher than Canada (and white+Asian is essentially Canada's racial makeup), and higher than New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Norway, and the UK; Estonia is below US Asians but above white Americans. Norway is by far the wealthiest Nordic state but its average is only two points higher than the US national average, despite not having a demographic that is 13% of the population and scores 85 points below the white American average.
The real problem will never be solved because it will never be named. I will probably get flagged, dead just for writing this. Whites and Asians in America perform far better on PSIA than the international average; the American Asians better than Asia, the whites better than Europe, mostly.
No, the inconvenient truth of the matter is that american blacks (and Hispanics? Not sure) drag down the scores. This score, and every score that we have yet devised. Every measure of intelligence that we can think of, every control for income and parents, every statistical trick to attempt some socially acceptable explanation, it all comes up the same way: they're just not as smart. The natural attempt to handwave this as some kind of systemic racism is thwarted by the existence of those poor Asians who perform better than whites; this is another inconvenience and is why Asians are being quietly dropped from "PoC" initiatives and measurements. Californian education reform is all a song and dance to desperately ignore this fact. When you have a group of people who are less smart, and the goal is that they achieve the same level as everyone else, what can you do? Well, you can give them more class time and free tutoring, but no one will support an initiative where some students take extra classes. There simply is no solution apart from lowering the ceiling. And since the governing bodies refuse to stop measuring everything by race, they also refuse to simply segregate based on ability, since this would show too many blacks in the lower performing classes.
This problem will literally never be solved under the current mode of thinking. It can't be, because those in charge are adamant about rejecting reality. No solution can be had if the problem cannot be identified. They will continue lowering the ceiling, and they may eventually lower it enough to get an equitable result. But those pesky private schools and tutors will still be around ruining their plans, and if there ever still exists a high educational standard out there somewhere, it's the tutored and the private schooled who will pass that bar. And at that point then it actually will be because of privilege.
For as long as it has existed, the USA has maintained separate categories of governance with limitations that ensure local and state control over certain areas.
The constitution makes clear (to me, but I'm not a constitutional scholar) that the federal government has specific enumerated responsibilities, everything else is up to the states and local governments. The benefit of this is it allows competition of ideas for governance between the states, which occasionally reveals alternatives that aren't always apparent. (For example, the disparate state wide regulations put in place to mitigate the impact of Covid. Why are the states doing things so differently?)
Unfortunately, there are big differences between schools across the country and the federal government has tried to get involved, despite the constitution. To work around the constitution the feds use now commonly employed methods like spreading federal tax money around to fund federally regulated programs in state and local school programs. It might be better if the country didn't have to be so indirect about it and could simply impose a uniform educational system, but this would require a titanic effort to overcome state's rights types of constitutional challenges.
Is it really just a money problem for schools? I don't think so. Baltimore public schools are notoriously bad, but spend well over the national average per pupil.
The Leander Independent School District is nearby to me. It is ranked 12th among 1,018 Texas school districts. It's an excellent school district. It has a 97% graduation rate and an average SAT score of 1230 while the Texas wide average is 1022. This school district spends $11,496 per pupil, which is below the national average of $12,239, see [1].
It seems that without spending more we could do much better by emulating the Leander Independent School District and ensuring that instead of $12,239 being the national average spending make it the national minimum spending per pupil.
Parents willing to spend even more could still move those districts that spend twice as much per pupil, but we should strive to give all students the benefits of a school district like the Leander Independent School District.
If you are referencing property taxes funding schools, you should know that it actually only funds about half of total school funding. The other half comes from federal and state governments and the way they give out funding is to selectively counteract that misallocation such that 47 states actually allocate more per-student funding to poor areas than to wealthier ones and according to this article [0], it has been this way since at least 1995.
I said state and federal: "Considering federal, state, and local funding, almost all states allocate more per-student funding to poor kids than to nonpoor kids, though only a few—Alaska, New Jersey, and Ohio—are highly progressive. A handful—Nevada, Wyoming, and Illinois—are weakly regressive, and the majority have a weakly progressive distribution of funding to poor versus nonpoor students."
I think that we can agree that the whatever they are doing in the United States isn't working very well. According to the scores on the PSIA math test given internationally to 15 year olds, the US ranks behind 21 other nations [1], well below the international average. Why not pick, say, the top four countries, (recently South Korea, Japan, Switzerland, and the Netherlands) and adopt their methods that are working? Instead of dreaming up new approaches that have no quality research justification, just teach math in a manner that is already known to be significantly better.
[1] https://www.nsf.gov/nsb/sei/edTool/data/highschool-08.html